July 2023
From The Chair
As the proverb goes – May you live in interesting times.
It has certainly been an interesting year, starting with fantastic efforts of each of our competition groups, through to a changing of the guard at RoboRoos.
Now that life is mostly back to normal – this is now our first, hopefully of many, newsletters to ensure we are all aware of how successful RoboRoos is both in terms of educating students in STEM and how it applies to Robots, but also in competition performance.
Changing of the guard:
Although some haven’t had children participating at the club for a number of years, the passions of Peter Ryan-Kane, Fiona Mansfield, and Sharon Gilmour, and Damian Byass have kept each of them in the driving seat to ensure that all of us newcomers just slot into a club where things happen like clockwork.
Finally after many years of exemplary service to the Club, the executive team have decided to take some time out to focus on their lives outside of the SRCSA.
In order to make this happen, we have had a changing of the guard, and a number of new people have volunteered to help with the running of the club.
A part of this process was to elect a new Chair to take over the brilliant work done by Peter in driving the club, and this is where I now fit into the picture:
My name is Sandy Carney, only just on the right side of 50, with a background as an Electronics and Software engineer for nearly 30 years, covering many fields of product design/development, coming to eventually running my own company in Melbourne for 15 years.
During COVID times, like some of you I’m sure, I had some time to have a bit of a epiphany, deciding to move to Adelaide to become the Electronics Group Manager at Micro-X over at Tonsley Innovation District, to let me focus more on my family and less on business.
My 10 year old son, Owen, is now a member of the club, starting with FTC last year and competing in FLL this year. As a child he has always had the engineering “knack”, at 2 1/2 years old bringing a multimeter from my workshop to help me test cables, luckily he now has somewhere to develop this love of technology and building things with other like minded people his age.
Once I joined Micro-X, I learnt of a Robot club in the old Mitsubishi Building that “could do with some help if you have some time to volunteer”. I’ll be honest, after that first night, meeting with Peter and looking through the club rooms, I was completely blown away by the calibre of the work being done by the students in creating these fantastic robots and the efforts being put in by the mentors to help make it happen.
How could I not help out? well this escalated quickly when the club found itself short of an FTC coach a week or two before competition. Faced with dropping one team of kids, I was asked if I could help the joeys group through the build. Running with the motto of “fake it until you make it”, I agreed and joined the Joeys 19377 team, being as green as each of the students.
We then spent 10 weeks building something far beyond my expectations for a group of kids that had not touched tools, or programmed, before.
This is where I saw the passion of the kids really coming out in being able to “teach” their parents instead of the other way around for a change. I saw the heartbreak and tears when their claw broke at the regional competition causing a slide from 2nd to last position. Then the pride and joy when they won the innovation award for their creation at the end of the day.
Club Structure
For the coming year we have put together a slight change in the club structure to try and level the load across the volunteers. Some positions are still being finalist and a full organisation structure will appear in next months newsletter.
In terms of Club operation each Competition Group should largely run independently to achieve their goals in performing the FIRST challenge. They will meet at the clubrooms, preferably weekly, throughout each school term as agreed with the Competition lead, the coaches and mentors.
RoboRoos generally does not run during school holidays to allow everyone a break to recharge, but access can be arranged by each competition group if desired.
Robots in 2022/23 in review:
From the 2022 FTC PowerPlay season we had 15210 The Wafflers head off to Sydney for the Nationals and they performed admirably by being a finalist for the Think Award.
Following on from that we had the Rangers FLL team head off to Melbourne for the FLL “SuperPowered” Nationals and did extremely well progressing to the World Championships in Morocco.
At the same time we had the FRC team commence their “Charged Up” season – putting together their Zooper Dooper robot. Being a much smaller competition group this year, the amount of effort, work and learning achieved by the students over the build period was astounding (and exhausting).
The FRC had a good showing in the nationals, bringing home the Excellence in Design award no less, and learning some valuable lessons, which they put into practice for the MRT competition and showed great improvement in their result.
The RoboSeals took the autonomous boat to Sydney for the National Competition, and while not performing as well as they had hoped, they brought back a huge amount of learning that we will put into the next season’s competition. This season is a Virtual competition open to anyone at the club, so if you are interested in joining in please let Adam Jenkins know as the Competition coordinator.
Training:
Progressing throughout the year each team will conduct internal training sessions, on various topics decided by both the mentors and the students. This will begin with an introduction to robotics, demystifying the basics of how to get a basic robot together. Additional sessions will then build on their knowledge gained throughout each season.
Training will also be provided periodically on tool usage (age dependant) so that students can make the parts they need (under adult supervision).
External Events:
Being technically intelligent is one thing, we also need to be socially savvy. On leaving school behind, we need to be able to interact with everyone around us.
So as a club we would like to start providing an opportunity for external events, either as a part of our learning goals, like visiting engineering companies to understand how they might fit into robots, or by doing excursions unrelated to robots to learn more about our team-mates, coaches and mentors, in order to just have some fun.
If students have particular events that you would like the club to organise please let us know and we will do our best to make it happen.
Make sure you keep an eye out in the newsletters and emails for upcoming events to ensure you don’t miss out.
While it has certainly been a busy year, looking forward, it seems we are only just starting out again. I’m sure we will have a great 2023/2024 season for FLL and FTC, starting over the next month. The FRC team is having some R&R getting ready to restart again in January.
As always please volunteer where you can – as we say the club does not run without your help. If you feel you can help the teams in any way – even an extra pair of eyes helps, please get involved. This is a great way of learning robots yourself.
I’m looking forward to more great things this year as a club and seeing more fabulous creations.
All the best
Sandy