Welcome to the weekly newsletter, October 21, 2020 – Remote Event Update Edition!
We hope you are having a great week!
Quick but Important Survey
As we finalize event schedules, we’d like to know where each team (or program – if you have lots of teams then you can just fill it out once) stands, here, about 6 weeks into the season. Are you able to meet? Have you started a robot? Can your robot score? Any issues of note? There are also a couple of scheduling questions that will help us finalize things for the season.
Things to do this week
1) Very Important: Watch this set of videos on remote scoring and practice. It shows you exactly how a remote event will work. It also gives you a way to practice matches and scoring before your first event.
2) Fill out the survey (see above)
3) Sign up for remote events (see below)
4) Run your robot (or just log in to test things if you don’t have a robot ready – this is probably almost everyone!) at the scrimmage event next week (see below).
Sign Up now for Remote League Meets!
We will have five remote league meets over the next several months, and we have some good news: You can choose up to five of them to attend! So no need to fear showing up for the first one with a robot that barely works because you will have lots of opportunities to improve your scores without penalty. Remember that each meet has six matches per robot, and over the course of the season you will get to keep the top 10 scores to apply to your standings in your league tournament at the end of the season. For example, if you play 3 remote meets, you will keep your top 10 out of 18 scores.
Meets are each open for 7 days, and will be held:
- Nov 29 – Dec 5
- Dec 13-19
- Jan 17-23
- Jan 31 – Feb 6
- Feb 14-20
Each team will get to attend one league tournament as well. These are currently planned to be in-person events on a Saturday between Feb 20 and March 27. Standby for more news on these in a couple of weeks, after venues are finalized.
To play in a remote event, you are going to need:
- Your robot.
- A remote field to play on
- Internet access to the FTC Remote Scoring System
- A device for entering scores
- A field display (optional)
If you don’t have access to a field, we can help with that. Just speak up! Given that each team will have access to so many chances to play and drop their low scores, we will not have a lot of scrimmage events.
If anyone has fun name ideas for these events (“Robot Rumble”, “Thanksgiving Throwdown”, etc. — okay those are names, not necessarily fun names) send ‘em to tsmith@firstinspires.org for the planning committee’s consideration.
October scrimmage event! Oct 26-Nov 1
We’ve already got one event on the schedule! We want as many teams as possible to try to give your robot a drive if you are able to do so. If not, then we still want you to log into the scoring system and see if it works so we can give feedback to FIRST. This is purely to help everyone get to know the scoring system we’ll be using for remote events, so really there is no robot required.
Watch this set of videos to see how it works, and how you can also run practice matches for your own team. We can also make this the primary topic of next week’s Last Friday Coaches’ Hangout so we can test it out together.
Mailing list information
Coaches or mentors will be added to this distribution list automatically, but anyone can join – volunteers, competitors, parents, administrators, sponsors, students, etc. are all welcome! They can subscribe by sending an email to:
ok-ftc-newsletter+subscribe@googlegroups.com
(sign in with a Google account may be needed). If you cannot get that work for some reason, then please email tsmith@firstpartners.org with the subject “newsletter subscription” and you will be added manually. Please check your spam/junk email folder to make sure it’s not ending up in the wrong location.