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FTC Team
How We Got Started
In the spring of 2006, our FTC, then known as the VEX team, was co-founded by members of FRC Team 694 Nathan Keyes and Nathan Bixler with the idea of getting more of our school involved with FIRST. Since then, the team has worked closely with the FRC team, sharing their lab.
The 2006 VEX team at the Region 4 Competition
Region 4 Robotics Competition
Since the team was started at the end of the 2006 FIRST VEX Competition season, our first competition and highlight of the year was a VEX competition hosted by Stephen Schapinsky of Region 4 Robotics in Queens. Read more about this event on our Region 4 Competition page.
FVC
Although the FIRST VEX Competition challenge is released in September, our team got off to a late start in 2006 , registering and assembling the team only three weeks before our regional. Our small team worked hard to produce a robot that would compete in our first FVC competition. The event was quite successful as we won two out of four of our matches. Read more about that year's competition on the 2006 Season page.
There were many more interested students this year, warranting the entry of two teams. Many of last year's members have since moved on to become full fledged members of Team 694. However, the two teams are now led by veterans Jordan Perr and Susan Zheng. Taking a lesson from last year, the teams started designing early on in September and met weekly to work on the bots. At competition, the robots performed admirably and both ended up on the same alliance and became quarterfinalists at the NYC Regional. Read more about that year's competition on the 2007 Season page.
Moving Forward to VISC
During the offseason, our efforts are directed toward involving even more Stuyvesant H.S. students in this fun and rewarding program. As a result, VISC (Vex Inter-Stuy Competition) was created. This program is meant as a general introduction to FIRST for students who may not yet want the commitments involved with a full-fledged FIRST team. Instead, VISC is significantly less time consuming and has since recruited several more members to the Vex team. The competition operates by pitting teams of members against each other in unique challenges.
FTC
For the 2008 season, FIRST changed the FVC program to the FTC program and changed from the VEX platform to the TETRIX platform and gave teams the option to use NXT-G, LabVIEW, or RobotC to program their robots to make the challenge more accessible to teams with a wide range of experience levels. The challenge was called FaceOff. The object of the game was to acquire hockey pucks of your teams color from troughs on four sides of a square field and dump them into a cyclindrical or triangular container in the center of the field. The teams were led by President Robert Juchnicki and Vice-President Yimeng Xu. One team opted for a design that implemented a lever with a cup at the end resembling the troughs. The other one attempted a daring design with a container that rolled along knotches on a ramp, functioning similarly to a fire truck's extending ladder. We attended the FTC New York City Regional held at the Jacob Javitz Center, where the team with the lever robot got up to the semifinal rounds, where after a close and heated match they were eliminated.
We are currently well into the 2009 season and have amazing things in store!