About Our FIRST® Tech Challenge Team
We are Hawkbot1cs team 20790. Originally founded as a school club in 2021, our team, performance and ambitions have grown tremendously.
About the FIRST® Tech Challenge
The FIRST® Tech Challenge, or FTC, is a program of the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) organization. Intended for students grades 7 - 12, the FIRST® Tech Challenge teaches students to think like engineers. Students will design, build, test, iterate, program, and compete using robots built using reusable materials and coded on the Android platform. Participants and alumni have found educational opportunities, sponsorships, and future employers through their work in the FTC program, demonstrating the quality of STEM experiences the FIRST® organization provides.
Our History
Powerplay
This was our inaugural season as a FIRST® Tech Challenge team, and we faced a steep learning curve. None of our members had had any previous experience with robotics, so they learned every single step from scratch, from how to use linear slides to programming basic driving controls to presenting in front of a panel of FTC judges. Our design, featuring a turret, was a great feat of engineering, yet was too complicated to use. We ended the season near the bottom of the group, but left the qualifying tournament with an Innovate Award and a bunch of knowledge in hand!
Centerstage
We decided to approach our second season with the same creativity that won us an Innovate Award the previous year. The challenge this year was to place pixels (hexagons) on an inclined board to create “mosaics.” There were also opportunities to launch paper airplanes (“drones”) and hang the robot. While we managed to increase our outreach to our local STEM community a lot, winning us the Motivate Award, we suffered several setbacks in our design, which led to us once again ranking near the bottom of our qualifying tournament.
Into The Deep
The 2024-25 season was a game-changer for our team. We decided to change the way in which we compete by participating in the local league meets, meaning we were competing at least 5 times a year instead of competing once. This gave us much more time to analyze strategies that work and iterate on our designs between the meets, while also helping us meet more teams in our community. The challenge this year was to grab samples (small rectangular prisms) from the “submersible” and to either place them in a basket or hang them from a bar as “specimen.” After the league meets, we still hadn’t won an event yet, but we still had a chance! We were invited to the Spark Invitational, where we scored the 8th highest score in Oregon (at the time) and won the event alongside our friends at Beyond Tech. We left the event with a second-place Inspire Award in hand and a spot at the Oregon FIRST® Championship. We ended this record-breaking season with an offensive power rating in the top 10% of teams across the globe!