Ian Wang
The Aragon For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology Robotics Competition team competed in the CalGames robotics competition from October 3-5 at Woodside High School. CalGames is an offseason event put on by FIRST, the organization that runs all the competitions in the regular season. Since it was an off-season event, teams competed in last year’s game, where the main objective is to pick up pipes, called coral, and put them onto elevated platforms, called reefs.
At the competition, teams can score points by putting coral on different levels of the reef. There are four levels, with higher levels benign worth more points. The team with the higher score wins the match and earns ranking points, which are used to determine the final standings at the end of the event. Aragon FRC’s robot went 9-2 in their matches, earning them third place out of 39 teams.
The team consistently places well in competitions, taking home first place in the Inspire award just last year. The award is for the best “all-around” team that not only presents a great robot but, importantly, also acts as an ambassador for the FIRST organization in getting more interest in STEM.
“Off-season competitions are a place for us to grow [and] learn,” said junior FRC co-captain Braden Chiu. “It’s a pressure-free space where we can try out new things.”
Another goal for the competition is to get new members some experience.
“Our priority is to give our trainees a really good, holistic overview of what an actual competition will look like,” said senior FRC co-captain George Tao. “We want our trainees to get a really good look into what they’re working for.”
Each season comes with a new game that presents new challenges.
“There’s always something kind of new, so I think there’s some creativity that has to be involved in thinking about [it],” said faculty advisor Craig Sipple. “You have to kind of figure out how we’re gonna do it.”
The team’s competition engine is split into four main sub-teams: design, fabrication, electrical and programming. Although they work on the same project, the sub-teams are often not aware of what is happening on the other end.
“It’s easy to become siloed,” Sipple said. “That’s a challenge. We have to get people within most of the teams talking to each other.”
While winning is a goal, members of the team also find joy in learning and continually improving their skills.
“One of our most important goals is learning and being able to iterate on our design,” said Evelyn Chu, junior and vice captain of Aragon Robotics’ FIRST Tech Challenge team.
Since Aragon Robotics competes multiple times throughout the year, it is a challenge to keep improving their robot.
“We’re trying to do the best we can, but we’re also trying to test our ideas, gain knowledge by either failing or succeeding, seeing what works [and] what doesn’t work,” said junior FTC programming lead Michael Chen. “That’s part of the engineering process, iteration, failing, learning from your mistakes; that’s also just a valuable life skill that people need to learn.”
“I like the competitions, because it’s very exciting,” Chen said, “There’s a lot of team spirit, the matches are really exciting, there’s points and crazy robot action on the field. It’s kind of like Battle Bots, but not violent. It’s just really fun, you get invested in the game [and] you care about who wins, who loses.”
Aragon Robotics’ next competition will be an FTC competition on Nov. 8.
