FIRST Robotics — Team 6632

FIRST Robotics gives a high-school team roughly six weeks to design, build and program a competition robot for a game revealed at the start of the window. The deadline does not move, the rules change every year, and the team rebuilds from nothing each season.

I ran programming for Team 6632, Supreme Robotics, out of Northview Heights Secondary School in North York. The team made it to regionals. I stayed involved on and off after that.

The award I am proudest of from FRC was not for the robot. It was 2nd place for safety at the 2018 FRC event at McMaster University, for an Android app I built in Java covering the safety protocols and procedures for every 2018 FRC competition and event.

Robotics competitions are genuinely hazardous places — a pit full of teenagers, power tools and half-assembled machines. Putting the protocols on a phone, where anyone in the pit could actually reach them, turned out to be worth more than another subsystem on the robot.