Beach Blitz
After a year stuck at home with no physical robot, Triton Tech, CdM’s robotics team is going back to in-person competitions. Over quarantine, all the team could do was participate in the FIRST robotics online competition. They submitted a game to the Game Design Challenge, which asked teams to prepare a game for possible future competitions. Although it was not the same, the Game Design Challenge was a way for the team to have something to focus on. Now, the team is working on their first in-person competition in over a year, Beach Blitz.
Beach Blitz is an offseason competition that is held throughout Orange County between many schools. It uses the FIRST competition from the previous year and allows teams to make any changes to their robot and compete with those additions. It is supposed to be a way for teams to get their minds working and learn from experience, so they can improve on what they have already built. Senior Will Geoghegan, the head of the team, comments on how preparations are going so far, “Preparations are going great, I love it, it’s difficult because we weren’t able to meet last year so we are essentially building a robot from scratch. However, we are getting very close to being done with it, and I am excited to be able to compete with it.” For the past few weeks, the subteams have been working long hours to build the robot and fix errors. They meet Monday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, and when you walk by their workroom in the 500 building, you can hear their tools drilling and sawing metal. The software subteam leader, Christopher Robinson-Perez, wanted to let readers know “Software is better than all the other subteams.” The software subteam has been known to show pride in their team, terrorizing the zoom meetings with matching backgrounds saying software is greater than the other teams.