News & updates for The Prairie Bytes FTC team.
Terry schools team startup
We’re in the process of starting a team to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge. The mentors for the team are Darryl Pisk (School IT coordinator) and Kristina Lukasikova (High School science teacher).
Thank you Kristina for volunteering.
The competition is open to 7th – 12th graders.
Information about the competition can be found here: https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/ftc
We’re in the very early phases with many hoops left to jump through but the process has been started. Students interested in joining the team can contact one of the mentors.
| 9/18/24 |
| Kristina & Darryl held a recruiting meeting today. We had many interested students. I sent emails to some of the parents today. These emails included information about the team as well as instructions on how to sign students up. We’ll be holding our parents meeting soon. Time and location will announced when decided. We’ve received another grant so we now have the hardware startup costs covered. The hardware will be ordered in the next couple of days. The date for the first qualifying event has been set. It’ll be on November 23rd in Butte. The date for the second qualifier hasn’t hasn’t been set but will probably be Jan. 18th in Helena. The state championship will be on Feb. 7th in Bozeman. |
| 9/10/24 |
| I attended a team meetup in Helena this last weekend and made some good contacts that will be very valuable going forward. This seasons FIRST Tech Challenge robot ‘game’ was presented by the FIRST organization on Saturday. Here’s a link to the YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewlDPvRK4U4&t=269s Our team naming contest is over and the winning name is ‘The Prairie Bytes’. We didn’t want Terry or Terriers in the name since we may have team members that aren’t attending school in Terry. This week we’re having a contest to create a logo for the team. I’ll soon be sending out emails to the guardians of students interested in joining the team. Great News! As I was typing this I received an email from the Gianforte Family Foundation saying that a grant for $1,500 has been approved. That should cover most of the hardware startup costs that will include this: https://www.gobilda.com/ftc-starter-bot-resource-guide-into-the-deep/ Team Fusion in Helena was nice enough to give me a set of Mecanum wheels that allows movement from side-to-side so our ‘bot will get some extra mobility. Thank you Dan! We’re officially on our way. |