Diary of an Innovator - Introduction

Original Post: Introducing FIRST Diary of an Innovator Blog Series and Team 23206, Automaducks

During the 2023-2024 season, follow along as we hear from 4 FIRST® LEGO® League, 4 FIRST® Tech Challenge, and 4 FIRST® Robotics Competition teams from around the world about their season experience and the culture of innovation their team has created.

Learn about the FIRST LEGO League Diary of an Innovator teams here, and the FIRST Robotics Competition Diary of an Innovator teams here.

This is the first set of blogs posts you’ll read from each team over our CENTERSTAGE presented by RTX season. In this second post, meet Team 23206, Automaducks from Sammamish, Washington.

We are the Automaducks, Team 23206, a rookie team getting ready to compete in the CENTERSTAGE challenge. What sets us apart from other teams is that we are a small, all-girl team: Maya Bomfim, Jiayi Xiong, Anzelia Yu, and Prisha Kulkarni. Since there are four of us, everyone has to do a little of everything. Whether it be coding, building, or outreach, all of us work together to complete tasks. All of us are 8th graders who attend Beaver Lake Middle school, in the state of Washington, where we initially got introduced to robotics and the FIRST programs over the past few years.

The school has both FIRST LEGO League and FIRST Tech Challenge programs, where we all got started. 3 of us - Anzelia, Jiayi, and Maya–started in 6th grade in FIRST LEGO League. Competing in the Cargo Connect challenge was fun and the start of our FIRST journey.

Then last year, three of us–Anzelia, Maya, and Jiayi–competed in FIRST Tech Challenge POWERPLAY presented by RTX and Prisha competed in FIRST LEGO League SUPERPOWERED, making this her first season in FIRST Tech Challenge. Like us, she loved the environment of the FIRST community and is eager to gain more FIRST Tech Challenge skills this year.

All of us hope to continue to develop our coding proficiency, teamwork dynamics, engineering mindset, and leadership skills, and we’re open to hoping to learn anything else we might not already know. Last year, we were on public teams, and it was such a wonderful experience we decided to take it to the next level. So, we started up our community team together. We began this past February and started with learning Java, putting together a POWERPLAY robot, and honed various skills in preparation for this season’s challenge. We’re so excited to be working on CENTERSTAGE!

There are so many different ways to tackle the challenge this year. We approached this year’s challenge with a focus on simplicity. From all the endgame tasks to the precision required to make mosaics, there was so much to think about. Our team worked through it together. To draw inspiration, we watched other teams take their approaches, we reviewed past challenge videos, looked at FIRST Robotics Competition challenges, and scoured the web for possible strategies.

Eventually, we came to a conclusion that played to our strengths and resources. We came up with a 3D printed claw our team designed that picks up two stacked pixels and rotates them into a position to drop them on the backdrop. This claw is attached to a system of two angled linear slides. This is all mounted on a modified mecanum chassis. This left us with plenty of space for our suspension mechanism and our drone launcher.

Then came the challenging part, bringing these ideas to life. Given our team’s small size, we found it more effective to work cohesively rather than dividing into defined subteams. Instead, we work together to get things done on time, temporarily splitting into teams during meetings to work on different tasks. We trade off, one meeting working on code, the other on the robot chassis, or whatever else needs our attention.

We’ve been working hard to get everything up and running for our first League Meet in November. Our competition dates are set for November 3-5, December 1-3, January 13 or 14, and potentially February 3rd, depending on our qualification for the State Competition.

Written by Team 23206, Automaducks and FIRST Tech Challenge Staff