It’s time to meet the teams participating in our 10th Annual ROBOTICON Tampa Bay event! We’ll start with our FIRST Robotics Competition teams, which are competing in their off-season competition October 8 & 9. First up: Team 179 Children of the Swamp, from West Palm Beach, FL.
Among the oldest teams in Florida – and one of our original ROBOTICON competition teams, in the Finalist Alliance at our very first event in 2013 – Children of the Swamp was started in 1998, with students from all different schools and home schools within Palm Beach County.
“All of our mentors are volunteers, with some as alumni of the FIRST program,” writes the team.
“All of our on-season robots are called Swamp Thing. Our off-season robot is Tacodile (a reference to “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”) Some are calling this year’s off-season robot “Watermelephant-another reference to the movie.”
Team 179 sponsors include Motorola, Propp Family II Foundation, Florida Power & Light, Canon Solutions, American Stairs, EDF, and Education Foundation.
Our FIRST Robotics Competition teams will be playing the game “Rapid React” , which is played by two alliances of three teams each, with each team controlling a robot and completing specific challenges in order to score points.
The main scoring elements are “Cargo,” represented by over-sized tennis balls, about the size of a soccer ball, which teams vie to shoot into a central Hub and then a climbing challenge that provides extra points at the end of a match, depending on high up the hangar assembly their robots can go before the buzzer signals the end of the match. The overall objective of each match is to score more points than the opposing alliance before the match ends.
You can enjoy a full weekend of Rapid React gameplay at ROBOTICON, at University Mall (soon to be RITHM at Uptown) , in Tampa, FL, October 8 & 9!
There will also be an Innovation Fair for all to enjoy and opportunities to learn how to get involved in or start teams in your school or community. ROBOTICON Tampa Bay is free and open to the public. Visit our event page to see the schedule for our Manufacturing Month event, which will feature different competitive robotics programs each weekend in October! Teams interested in registering can do so HERE.