By Anand Our goal for our Open House when we did our brainstorm and organized our Agenda for the night was for us to share what our team has learned over the past 8 weeks of doing FTC with others who might be interested in learning about Robotics.   We wanted to show them our Robot and give kids a chance to work our controllers and make him move.   We wanted to teach them about the different unique parts of our Robot, like our arm, our sweeper, and our basket design.   We wanted to also show them a little bit about block programming and give them hands-on experience with doing a simple program that they could modify.  We also taught the attendees about the differences between what an Autonomous vs. Teleop and how our team learned to successfully program "Smitty" to achieve our Rover Ruckus game goals.  We will be looking for at least 2 new team members to join our team and wanted to inspire other kids to join FTC community or school teams once they see...

By Jons The Rev Hub is very important in FTC robotics. It is important because it controls the robots motors, servos, and so much more.   It's basically like the "brains" of our Robot "Smitty".   As a team we didn't know what this was when we started.  But now after 10 weeks working on our FTC challenge preparation, we know what the ports are, where to plug in Servos vs. Motors and how critical it is to be careful with our Rev Hub.   We broke it by accident the first week of building and connecting it which was really stressful because one of our ports got broken and slipped inside the plastic box.  One of our dad's who is in engineer helped by opening it up and resetting the part and then we knew not to pull things in and out too hard when making connections with our wires onto the Rev Hub.

by Anand At Sharkfest, hosted by Hammerheads FRC team of Troy, which is the annual FLL qualifier.  Our team had a chance to share our robot and show elementary and middle school students what FTC is and how our Robot "Smitty" works. I spoke to a group of students about electronic parts and why we use sensors and what the wires do on "Smitty".  They asked questions and it was fun to teach someone else about robotics.

Our FTC robotics team is  hosting a Fun Interactive  Demo & Open House for  interested students to  visit us and learn about  robots & programming. Curious about Robotics?  WHAT IS FIRST?  WHAT IS FLL?  WHAT IS FTC? Learn about FTC Robotics Live Demo of our FTC Team Robot Learn block programming concepts Join us: Wed 11/28.  Time:  6:30-8:00pm   Where: Smith Middle School   Our event is open to all area 3rd - 5th graders We also invite Middle School students to explore Robotics opportunities Location:  SMITH MIDDLE SCHOOL,  5835 Donaldson Drive,  Troy, MI 48085 Join us in the Cafeteria on Nov 28th @ 6:30pm Send us an email to let us know you plan to attend: smithtechnoknights@gmail.com  RSVP's are appreciated but not required.   We just want to know how many attendees and which schools you are coming from so we can plan enoug...

Roster/team/how we work together/how we divide our roles By Ayush and Parent Mentor, Kaushika  I am going to talk about our roster,team/how we work together,and how we divide our roles.  In our robotics team our roster is Kazim, Astha, Ayush, Bakir, Sohan, Anand, Jons, Jaspreet, Nitya, Norbert and Sangeun.  With the guidance of our Parent Mentor, Ms. Kaushika, our team made a website/blog  www.smithtechnoKnights.blogspot.com .  We are going to pass this website to other teams when we finish 8 grade.  As some of our team members, like me, are only in 6th grade still.  Our team name is Techno Knights.  Our team is from Smith Middle School, and our team number is 15256.  The way we work together is by helping our team with various tasks like programming, building, etc.  The way we divide our roles is we have a Teleop Subteam and an Autonomous Subteam.   In the beginning we all worked on a...

Today I will tell you about the difference between FLL (first lego league) and FTC (first tech challenge).  By Kazim                There are many differences between these 2 that I will list below.  First difference is FLL uses only lego parts and in FTC you can use whatever you want, (metal parts, cardboard,etc.). Also FLL is an elementary school and FTC is middle school.  In FTC you have to put in a lot of effort for things like outreach and raising money for your team.  In FLL the technology is not that advanced and you do not need a driver(s), you use a program.  On the other hand, in FTC you need 2 drivers, but you also need a program to make the robot move.  In FTC the robot is way bigger and more advanced and the missions and rules are harder and more complicated.  These are the differences between FLL and FTC.