Our hybrid ROBOTICON 2021 event spanned a full month of robotics competitions and educational content, online and off, as we hosted over 500 youth from 45 K-12 youth robotics teams at AMRoC throughout October. In a bid to strike a balance between COVID safety and the opportunity for youth to experience an in person competitive event, we dedicated each weekend in October to a different youth robotics platform: FIRST LEGO League, VEX , FIRST Robotics Competition, NEXT, and FIRST Tech Challenge, with “pits” in the open mall area, a separate classroom space and small group access to fields for scrimmages and competitive matches. It was a different approach to our annual youth STEAM education showcase and FIRST Robotics Competition off-season, and a lot of work, but it also was a fun and memorable event.
Besides team pits, several of our great sponsors including SOFWERX and Bay Area Manufacturers Association tabled with interactive and informative exhibits. The exhibit area also included displays from USF IEEE and Infinity Aero Club.
Thanks to the generosity of the Tampa Innovation Partnership, who gave us open access to their classroom space across from AMRoC, we were also able to 
run student and mentor workshops and programs every weekend. FRC teams were also able to enjoy special tours of VU Studios, a high-end video production company located next door to AMRoC. And all teams had the opportunity to play HADO AR , an active gaming platform hosted exclusively at AMRoC Fab Lab, in partnership with Green Mouse Academy of South FL.
The entire event was livestreamed courtesy of PLUGHITZ Live – nearly 40 hours of recorded content that
includes interviews with sponsors, coaches, mentors, and team members, as well as matches. All content was also streamed to a large monitor in AMRoC’s front window, where teams in the mall pits and passersby could watch the event.
Our ROBOTICON 2020 NEXT Challenge award winners, alumni of M3 Might Mechanical Mustangs, also got to debut “Outage” their robotics challenge for alumni, by alumni, and we hosted a fun Alumni Social and Game Night, as well.
During our Make It Loud Awards Ceremony, teams and 
volunteers were recognized in-person and loudly, including special awards recognition submitted by teams for their recently ended virtual seasons. We also held our 2nd annual ROBOTICON CAD Challenge.
All in all, it was an amazing event, made possible by dedicated volunteers who gave up multiple weekends
to run ROBOTICON 2021, amazing sponsors and benefactors like RD Management who allowed us to use the entire west end of University Mall, Tampa Innovation Partnership, Frontier, the Florida High Tech Corridor, SOFWERX, Bay Area Manufacturers Association, Tampa Drones, VU and HADO USA.
Our 2021 Award Winners
FIRST LEGO League
Sixteen FIRST LEGO League teams participated during the first weekend of ROBOTICON, kicking off the event with all their high energy and enthusiasm! Join us in celebrating our 2021 ROBOTICON FLL award winners!
- Team 50812 Kraken– Team Spirit Award
- Team 40096 NovaBots – Gracious Professionalism
VEX VRC & IQ
VEX teams turned out in abundance for our first weekend of ROBOTICON, too, and showcased some
energetic game play of their own. Congratulations to these VEX team award winners!
- Team 70857B STEMPunk – Gracious Professionalism
- Team 6260 A Mercury – Field Performance Award
- Teams 33612 A&B – Judges Award for Perseverance
FIRST Robotics Competition
FIRST Robotics Competition teams had a full weekend of some creative, high energy robot competitions during the second weekend of our extended ROBOTICON 2021 event. Because robots were in various stages and configurations of builds due to the challenges and
constraints of the last virtual season, we opted for our own unique skills challenges developed by FRC team 5276 the Edgar Allan Ohms. The most popular of these improvised games turned out to be Robot Soccer, played with yoga balls. At least two yoga balls met their demise during the games, but they became highly sought-after trophies in their own right after the vigorous matches that laid them flat.
Congratulations to these great teams for taking home the following ROBOTICON 2021 awards!
- Team 233 Pink – Team Spirit
- Team 8324 MECO – Judges Award for Student Leadership
- Team 5557 BBR8ERS – Judges Award for Distance Traveled
- Team 1902 Exploding Bacon – Gracious Professionalism Walk Like Woodie Award
FIRST Tech Challenge
ROBOTICON always comes early in the season for FIRST Tech Challenge, so we pushed out their competition weekend to the last even weekend of ROBOTICON. With support from the Pinellas FIRST Tech Challenge League, nine teams joined in to scrimmage for this year’s game Freight Frenzy. Congratulations to our 2021 FTC award winners!
- Team 4725 Java The Hutts – GP Walk like Woodie Award
- Team 2845 Team Duct Tape – Judges Award for Outreach Excellence
- Palm Harbor University High School Pit Cluster! – Awesome Pit award
ROBOTICON CAD Challenge
FIRST Robotics Competition alum and mentor, Bryan Bautista, is the founder and facilitator of the ROBOTICON CAD Challenge and had this to say about our 2021 CAD Challenge winners.
For the ROBOTICON 2021 CAD Challenge we had two teams complete submissions for judging. With this we found it pretty easy to categorize our two winning positions.
For the team taking the Judges Award, we have awarded FLL Team 48501 Velociraptor. The team was able to make a fun robot to play the game we had created this year in an interesting manner for picking up the gold balls to score the game piece.
For the winning team we found the robot design to be extremely intricate. It holds the game pieces using something similar to a spindexer before launching them to their scoring locations. We would have loved to see this robot come to real life as it would have definitely been able to play the game up to the point of the minibot challenge. The All Star Award is given to Team 3216 MRT!
Make it Loud Awards
For this year’s event we offered teams the opportunity to recognize students, teams, and mentors who won awards last season, but didn’t have the chance to be recognized before a cheering crowd. Our cheering crowd was small, but loud, and we share these great 2021 season awardees here again for recognition!
- Make it Loud for FLL Team Kraken 2021 Missions Top Score West Coast FLL
- Make it Loud for FRC Team 1369 Minotaur 2021 FL Chairman’s Award
- Make it Loud for FRC Team 5276 Edgar Allan Ohms 2021 Innovation Challenge Semifinalist
- Make it Loud for FRC Team 8324 MECO 2021 Infinite Recharge At Home Rookie Design Award
- Make it Loud for FRC Team 8324 MECO 2021 Infinite Recharge At Home Rookie Game Changer Award
- Make it Loud for Aidan St. John of FRC Team 8324 MECO Mentor Atlas Award
- Make it Loud for The Midnight Mustangs for NEXT Robotics Competition Gracious Perseverance!
- Make it Loud for Terri Willingham 2021 Florida FIRST Tech Challenge State Championship Compass Award Winner
- ROBOTICON 2021 Best Media Partner Ever Award to Scott Ertz of PLUGHITZ Live
- ROBOTICON 2021 Volunteers of the Year Award Nathan Kutzan & Chase MacDonnell – For FMS Development and ROBOTICON FRC Games!
- ROBOTICON 2021 Green Shirts Award Allante Sparks for our ROBOTICON 2021 Logo
And we want to Make it Loud for EVERYONE who was part of ROBOTICON 2021! We’re grateful to all the teams who took a chance on our experimental showcase platform and off-season event, and to all the volunteers and donors who help make it all possible! Thank you for making it fun and awesome.
Pictures, Video and More!
You can find our full event album HERE as well as on our Gallery Page. You can also enjoy the full event playlist on our YouTube Channel. And if you liked our ROBOTICON 2021 logo, designed by Allante Sparks, on our event media and volunteer shirts now you can get your own at the AMRoC Threadless Shop!
Look for scrimmage opportunities throughout the year, and news about ROBOTICON 2022 – our 10th event! – sometime in the summer.
Wishing everyone every success in the new year – Go Teams!