Saturday, January 28, 2017

Volunteering at an FTC League Championship

I spent today volunteering at the local FIRST Tech Challenge league's championship meet. My first role was Robot Inspector. Previously, I had been a Field Inspector, making sure the robots could operate on the field and connect wirelessly. My new job entailed making sure the robots were physically acceptable, e.g. sized appropriately and made out of allowed components. That was very easy given the checklist. We completed inspections ahead of schedule, except for one team that needed to adjust their robot a bit to pass.

Then, I worked as a Scorekeeper, which was completely new to me. I expected that I would be sitting by the field and keeping track of the scoring events, but Scorekeepers actually manage the computer systems in the play areas. My job was to operate the timer on one of the two fields. When the emcee counted down to the start of the match, I pushed the button to make the big timer display start ticking. That was also very easy to do once I learned to navigate the special software they have.

We finished the matches almost on schedule without any major mishaps.

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