We are a Minnesota team from Mounds View and Southwest High School competing in FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC).

Recent developments

Swerve for FTC Webinar

Since our team created a 4-pod differential swerve drive for competition this year, we decided to host a webinar talking all about it on April 2nd. It was a blast to speak about everything we’ve learned from the process of making it and we’re super excited to see what other teams come up with in the future! If you missed the webinar and want to see a recording or want to review the slide deck, you can access them here:

Link to slide deck: Swerve Webinar Slide Deck

Link to recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5fjnxe7pNc

FIRST Minnesota State Championship

On February 11th, we were awarded the inspire award at the Minnesota State Championship! This means that we qualified for the FIRST World Championship which will be held in Houston, Texas on April 19-23. We’re super excited for it, wish us luck!

FIRST Minnesota Kickoff Presentation

During this year’s kickoff presentation in Minnesota, our team hosted a presentation about outreach and how to do it. If you want to view it you can view it here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1W2m_CxiYf1q0fznxL_trF85wePiKWdvEOip3SsLQSF8/edit?usp=sharing

You can also view it directly here:

Project Robotica Grand Opening

Since the beginning of the summer, our team has been working on a project called Project Robotica. Project Robotica(or PR) is a wiki site designed for youth robotics teams. This allows any team member, coach, team parent, judge ect. to join and add information about their particular programs. If you’d like to view the project and even contribute, you can see it here: http://projectrobotica.wiki

FIRST Minnesota State Championship Materials

This past year, during the Ultimate Goal season, we competed in the State Championship and performed well enough to get 3rd inspire and Connect! If you would like to view our Engineering Notebook or our Engineering Portfolio, you can see them here:

FIRST Promote Video

Each year, teams are able to optionally create a video that answers a question posed at the beginning of the season. This year the question was, “What makes FIRST work?” We were awarded for our submission at the Second Qualifier, and were nominated for the award at state! You can view our submission on our YouTube account here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp0rR0-cPus

Robot Run Video

This year we created a few Robot Run Videos to show off how we compete at tournoments! If you want to see our robot in action, you can see the final video on our youtube account here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kULyjz4v51o

Library Facebook Livestream

Our local Ramsey County Library has been live-streaming storytimes on their Facebook account. They had us come in and get featured during a Robotics-themed reading, and we got to show off our robot and FIRST. We created a video for that stream, and you can view that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7x7mycMOr4

Kickoff Presentation

Recently we presented for the MN FTC Kickoff breakout session! If you would like to see our slide presentation used for that Livestream, you can view it here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JYdh6SuHmzVw-mrxRfH5wwXRuN-gZY-ZICfx46SLPMw/edit?usp=sharing