Welcome to the weekly newsletter, October 28, 2020 – Scrimmage Edition!
We hope you are having a great week (and still have power and heat, if you were affected by the ice storm!) This one will be pretty short.
Quick but Important Survey
Thanks to all the coaches who filled out the survey so far. If you haven’t yet, please fill it out here:
We’ll report results next week.
Sign up for remote league meets
Choose as many as you would like!
Event preference for league tournaments will open in a week or two.
October scrimmage event! Oct 26-Nov 1
Our test scrimmage is open for business! We want every team to try to login this week and see if you can access the scoring system and play a match or six. Fake scores/matches are okay if your robot isn’t ready, but I’d really like everyone to take this opportunity to have your teams learn how to play a remote match. All teams that have registered with FIRST should be able to access this event, as I automatically registered all the teams in the state plus our one SW Kansas team.
We are guinea pigs on this — the very first FTC event of the season, anywhere –, so there are likely going to be bugs. Please email your bugs/issues to me and I’ll try to help (I don’t have “team access” since I don’t coach a team, so this might get a little tricky – bear with me).
1) Watch the videos on remote events at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEuGrYl8iBm48sXHM8wOIPECDvD1zGgr2
2) Whoever is listed as “coach 1” or “coach 2” needs to login at http://ftc-scoring.firstinspires.org/
3) At that point, they should be able to add others in the team as a “Team Administrator” on that site.
4) The team administrators can login to run the scorekeeper at http://ftc-scoring.firstinspires.org. If it throws an error, please click the FIRST Tech Challenge logo in the top-left corner and it might let you in. Hooray for bugs.
5) go ahead and play with the test matches. Run a real match if you can.
6) Let me know how it goes. We’re going to have to work through this together because I expect a lot of hiccups. If you run into a bug, please take a screenshot, note the time of the error, write a short description and email it to tsmith@firstpartners.org and it will be relayed to FIRST HQ.
This will also be a subject of this Friday’s coaches’ hangout from 4-6pm, so if you are having problems we can try to work them out together then.
The event window closes on Nov 1 at 8pm.
Last-Friday-of-the-Month Coaches / Mentors / Volunteers gathering
Our usual Final Friday gathering is 4-8pm on Oct 30! You can join via Zoom at:
We’ll be stepping through the scoring software and talking about anything else you want to bring up.
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.