After making it to the quarterfinals at the Wisconsin Regional and the semi-finals at the Midwest Region, CORE is focusing on future plans. This Saturday, April 16th, CORE is going to the Rockwell Automation UPAF Fundraiser which is held at Rockwell Automation’s world headquarters in Milwaukee. We are excited to demonstrate our 2016 robot at this wonderful event! On April 28th, we are heading back to Milwaukee to participate at the Rockwell Automation Take Your Child to Work Day.
This week’s meeting we started to plan out out Spring Interest Day. This is a day where we invite middle and high school students to come see what CORE is all about. We demonstrate our robot, present our subteams, and answer any questions potential rookies have. We hope to see you there!

This weekend CORE participated in our first competition of the season: the Wisconsin Regional. Due to excellent robot performance and driver control, CORE was ranked sixth out of over 50 teams after qualification matches. This raking qualified us to captain an alliance in the play off rounds. CORE fought valiantly in the quarterfinals together with teams 192 and 4241, and though we did not continue into the semifinals we are proud of this exemplary performance at our first competition.

In addition to our robot’s success, we are thrilled to announce that CORE was awarded the Judges Award at the Wisconsin Regional this year. This award recognizes a team that demonstrates exceptional abilities in one or many areas that may not fit perfectly into established award categories. We are very honored to have been recognized in this way.

This weekend CORE will be traveling to the Midwest regional in Chicago, Illinois. Stay tuned for further updates as we take on this next challenge; we encourage everyone to watch the livestream event here!

The last six weeks have been leading up to this night. All the subteams have completed their work with the robot and are continuing to prepare for competition. Design is updating their CAD models, Chairman’s is assiduously working on the Chairman’s Award, and robot related subteams are making final tweaks. Everyone is excited to see how far the robot has come from just a simple idea to a physical product!

It is full steam ahead for the all subteams as we have 10 days before bag-and-tag day! Bag-and-tag day marks the end of the build season, where we seal our competition robot, completed or not, in a bag until the Milwaukee regional. There is a real sense of urgency for many of the robot related subteams as they work extremely hard to have a finished product by the 23rd. Many of the other subteams are also being very productive, with the Chairman’s presentation completely written, and being memorized by the presentation team.

Today we also had Cybersaders, a rookie team we have been mentoring, come into our work space to use our practice field with their robot chassis. It was cool to see our two teams, students and mentors, working together to conquer this year’s game!

So far this years game has been a challenging one! After an entire week of consensus the team finally decided on a robot design and we’ve been busy building, testing, and improving it. Along with the robot we’ve also completed making our field elements and have begun to perfect our shooter.

In other news we’ve submitted the Chairman’s essay and are continuing to work on the Woodie Flowers and Entrepreneurship awards.  We have also started doing safety demos during our Saturday meetings to prepare for our competition safety test.

Our team has created a set of rules called the guidelines. These procedures have been created by our own team and is constantly being updated. If you are interested in learning more about the guidelines, click here.

After a three month hiatus, we’re back in the swing of things! School has started up and so has robotics season.

One of our summer activities was Adopt a Highway. We now clean Highway 59 from CTH “X” (South) to STH 164 WB. Going forward we are going to go out once a month and clean this highway. 

Another activity we did was the Les Paul 100th Anniversary celebration. We set up our tent and demonstrated Aether from 2013 and Gaia from 2015. Earlier in the summer we also attended the county fair where we demonstrated these robots as well.