Welcome Back! Welcome to the Gatorbotics newsletter! We are excited to share news of our team with you, whether you are a sponsor, a former mentor, a current parent, or just a general fan of our team. Go Gators! Programming During Preseason
As we near the end of November, that also means we're nearing the end of pre-season, a time for preparation and learning for our newest members. I spoke with junior Katherine Byunn-Rieder, the Gatorbotics programming lead, who has participated in robotics at Casti in all three years of her high school experience. When she joined our team as a freshman, she knew she had an interest in engineering, but she didn't have any background in programming. Three years later, she is the lead of our Programming subteam, a huge leadership position. She remarked that "I think something that is really important for people to know is that you don't have to gave a background in code to join programming. You're going to be learning alongside everyone else!". She accredits the robotics community here at Castilleja for allowing her to step into such an important leadership role in a field that she just began learning three years ago. She commented that she loves Gatorbotics' environment because she has been encouraged to face challenges for which she simply cannot find an immediate solution: "The [robotics] community has been my favorite aspect because it [the team] just provides such a great environment to learn, grow in, and get mentored. Gatorbotics has really piqued my interest in computer science." As mentioned, we're well into pre-season, and as one might imagine, the programming team has been hard at work. The sub-technical team codes the whole robot, controlling motors' speed, varying code during the autonomous and teleoperated periods of the game, and ya know, making sure the robot can function. For those of you who perhaps aren’t familiar with the FIRST competition world and lingo, a robotics match is split into two parts, autonomous and teleop. During autonomous, the robot is self-driving, which means it’s heavy on the programming side, as the coded instructions have to be pre-planned, so the robot has full functionality. Following the autonomous portion of the game, the teleoperated period will take place, which is when a member of our team will drive the robot using joysticks to complete several challenges. To prepare a robot for a competition, the programming team strives to have all the mechanisms and the drive code working. However, in autonomous, it can become difficult to rely on solely pre-coded commands because you never know until you’re in the competition if you’ll need a different variation of the code. For example, no team is guaranteed a set start position in the competitions, so it’s very possible that before the autonomous starts altercations will need to be made depending on what code we’ll need to call on. Times like these are when the foundational code we cover in pre-season comes into play. The foundational code is what allows everyone to be able to drive the robot. This year, the programming team has implemented a new pre-season curriculum, which is entirely student-designed and student lead. Every week of pre-season up until November 15, new team members have watched a short presentation and completed a small coding project to ensure that everyone on the programming team possesses the skills they need to write the code for the robot during competition season. With 20 new members on the subteam, it’s crucial that everyone can comprehend the foundational code. Ultimately, programming is all about understanding what you’re writing because you have to be able to know why you’re creating code so that you can apply that learning to different scenarios. As we head into our final weeks of preseason, the programming team has started writing the code that will drive the robot (to many victories this season). After new members write their drive code, they’ll be able to test it on last year’s robot, to simulate what it will be like come January. As the team returns from their Thanksgiving break, we can’t help but be reflective of all we’re grateful for. Team 1700 is always thankful for the support of its sponsors, parents, and mentors who encourage us to pursue our interest in robotics: “Gatorbotics has really piqued my interest in computer science because it’s such a real-world example compared to what we’re doing in classes and has made me more passionate about computer science and engineering” concluded Byunn-Rieder.
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