It’s that time of year again! Last Saturday, over ninety members of Team Sprocket gathered at Diamond Bar High School to commence the upcoming build season. This year’s Kickoff event aired with a Star Wars theme, with actors and characters like Mark Hamill, Daisy Ridley, and even R2D2 making guest appearances.
The 2020 competition, Infinite Recharge, places its focus on protecting FIRST City from incoming asteroids. During the game, teams can replenish the shield generator by shooting power cells and interacting with the control panel. The game includes a never-before-seen mechanic requiring teams to spin the color wheel (“control panel”) a certain amount of times or to certain colors. The game also features familiar mechanics similar to the ball-shooting mechanism from former competitions such as Stronghold and Steamworks, along with a bar climb from the Power Up competition.
Shortly after the Kickoff event aired, Team Sprocket split up into several groups, each studying a specific section of the game manual. After coming together to provide a presentation on the manual, the team was able to dissect its complex contents. They then broke for lunch and resumed the workday with Mr. Aguilar’s presentation, “More Than Robots.” Team Sprocket alumni had been arriving throughout the day, and by the early afternoon they were all present. Following Mr. Aguilar’s presentation, each of the alumni provided a piece of wisdom that they had accumulated through their time with the team.
The team then regrouped to begin the strategy meeting. During the meeting, the engineering subteams discussed several approaches to the competition while the business subteams began their build season preparations. The meeting concluded late into the night and everyone headed home to recharge for the busy weeks ahead of them.