Team Leaders, opportunities for your teams as we gear up for the 2022 Season.
Brush-up on Your Robot Competition Skills! Off-Season Events are Happening!!
The EMCC competition returns on Saturday Sept 18th, 2021, for a single day competition where teams experience the critical aspects of competing at an event in high energy surroundings. Learn (or relearn) how to queue, how to engage other teams, share tools and parts, remember to change batteries, program your radios, connect to an FMS, scout teams, demonstrate gracious professionalism, and recover parts off the field from your robots’ unexpected self-disassembly. EMCC will have an official FIRST field staffed by real FTAs and CSAs who will help your team rediscover the competitive strategic planning sequences which provide an edge when returning to gameplay in 2022. At this moment, ‘Everyone is a rookie’ so let EMCC help us all get better together. It’s why we’ve got Collaboration in our name. Signup at https://www.em-cc.org/ or email EMailEMCC@gmail.com.
The Minnesota Robotics Invitational (MRI), Roseville, is offering teams two possible scrimmage dates, Saturday, October 16 or Sunday, October 17. Please see https://firstuppermidwest.org/
The NMRC is opening its field to additional teams! Come join the fun in Upsala, MN, this October. Please see https://firstuppermidwest.org/
Housekeeping: Team Leads, please consider updating your Team Information via your team dashboard at firstinspires.org. Registering yourself and your team’s alternate contact, as well as updating your team’s financial / tax information now, will save you time when event registrations begin in late September. Be sure to read very carefully the new information about SALES TAX! There is a lot of information –new this season — included on this webpage: https://nam10.safelinks.protec
Team Leadership Help Wanted: As our FIRST Robotics Competition teams are coming back together for the 2022 RAPID REACT season, we have more than a dozen teams throughout Minnesota that need Lead Mentors. Have someone in mind that would be a good lead? Maybe it’s you? Please contact Ken Rosen, Minnesota Regional Director, krosen@umn.edu, for more information and to be connected to teams in need.
Communications Help Wanted: FIRST Upper Midwest is recruiting volunteers with skills in communications, graphic design, writing, social media, web design and web content. Please contact Laurie Shimizu, lshimizu@firstinspires.org for more information.
New Off-Season Design/Build/Compete event: Team 3100 out of Mendota Heights, MN is excited to announce the pilot of a new offseason event, with a twist! Using FRC-scale robots and systems, we’re creating an “FRC-lite” program for the fall that teams can join if they want a new way to train their students in the fall semester.
If you are interested in participating, please reach out to Charles Nepomuceno at cgtn729@gmail.com if you’d like more information or would like to join this fall!
Detail Summary
• Game Reveal: September 25, 2021
• Registration Costs (up to 3 TT teams per 1 FRC team): First Team = $150 | Second Team = $50 | Third Team = $25
• Competition Date: December 4-5, 2021
• Competition Size: 12-16 TT teams
• Field Size: 27′ x 30′
• Game Format: 2 vs 2 | Semifinal Playoff Bracket
Program Details
Turtle Trials is a way to train direct 1:1 transferable skills to teams in the offseason that is missed by just going to traditional offseason events. We are not the first to pursue this kind of program, and we take inspiration from OCCRA out of Michigan and BunnyBots out of PWN/CHS regions. The part of the program that I believe is most important is that early fast-paced brainstorming, prototyping and evaluation that does not come with established teams attending normal offseason events, because (for the most part) teams are bringing in previously existing robots, or even modified/new robots after a year’s worth of gameplay experience in that game.
Turtle Trials allows teams to experience a full build & competition season throughout an entire fall semester to help train their students on those fundamental skills before the build season. TT will release a new game at the start of every fall semester much like FRC does every year, but these games will be smaller-scale (30’x27′ field) in a 2v2 tournament setup with playoffs at the end of the event. The games will be designed in a way where simple robots can perform well, as long as strategy & performance are executed properly. The robots will be similar in size/scale as FRC robots, but are meant to challenge teams to find the cheapest/simplest ways to accomplish these tasks with a tighter budget on overall robot costs (think 118’s yearly Everybot projects).
With TT available to teams throughout the entire fall semester, teams can choose how they want to approach their execution of making their TT robots. You can choose to (1) have a more relaxed pace throughout the entire fall semester (10-12 weeks) by meeting once or twice a week, (2) mimic their build season schedule 1:1 (6-8 weeks) at whatever weekly meeting cadence they prefer, or (3) choose to have a condensed boot camp/sprint type of build period (2-3 weeks) closer to the end of the semester after they’ve completed their own internal fall training programs.
Each FRC team can register up to 3 Turtle Trials teams. We prefer that each robot uses the official FRC control system, but since we do not use a central field management system, teams can choose a control system that makes sense for their budgets/resources, so long as they’re able to manually enable/disable for different periods of the match (auton vs. tele-op). The availability of FRC control system components is usually the limiting factor for how many TT teams each FRC team wishes to register. With Turtle Trials being a smaller scale grassroots effort by 3100, the registration costs are meant to hopefully balance out the needs of the event such as field build costs, space reservation, etc. We hope to reduce the cost of registration in future years if the program is proven effective and expanded to more regions within FUM (Minnesota/North Dakota/South Dakota).
Regards, Mark Lawrence
Chairman, MN FIRST Regional Planning Committee