The 2013 FIRST game, Ultimate Ascent, was finally announced at the January 5^th kickoff, and since the AdamBots have begun discussing, creating, and testing designs for this year’s robot.

The first week and a half of the FIRST build season has been, as ever, extremely busy as we’ve had to start from the beginning again to create a brand new robot design, one that is now challenged to shoot discs, climb pyramids, and compete in a game that will require a lot of strategy.

To begin our ascent into this year’s competition, we met at Crittenton Hospital to discuss the new game. After a thought-provoking presentation about Ultimate Ascent by mentor Rick Drummer, we split up into six different teams to come up with designs for the robot and its different mechanisms. This year we had many elements of the robot to consider, including the type of shooter, method of disc pickup, whether or not we wanted to climb, and what size robot we wanted to make. The meeting was very productive and we came up with some interesting and varied designs.

Starting with the 7^th of January, design meetings were held in the CAD room at Adams throughout the week to select an overall design that would fit our strategy the best. In the meetings we went over which features and abilities would be the most important for us to include in our robot, and decided that shooting effectively and picking up discs from the floor would be two of the most important things to consider. We also decided to find a way for our robot to climb the pyramid, as climbing is worth a lot of points in Ultimate Ascent.

We eventually finalized our design, and have made some progress in building prototypes, drawing our final design on CAD, and organizing schedules to begin the full build. Throughout the next few weeks the engineering students and mentors will be working diligently to get our robot up and running.

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Non-engineering teams have also continued their work from the OCCRA season in working to spread the message of FIRST and the AdamBots throughout the schools and community.

The marketing team started to introduce some new members to the responsibilities of the team during FIRST. The priorities before going to the Myrtle Beach Palmetto Regional, a competition we are attending for the first time this year, were discussed. We focused on coming up with a design for the Myrtle Beach T-Shirts, and some renovations to our pit. We also came up with some new ideas for videos we could make this season.

The business plan, photo/video, and animation teams have all continued to work. However, since there is no animation award for FIRST this year, the animators have decided to work on improving their skills and competing in some friendly competition.

The new media team has been working on brainstorming ideas for a podcast and series of vlogs to help spread news about our team and the message of FIRST. Hopefully we will be able to upload our first podcast by next week.

Overall the last week and a half has been very productive and we are on the right track to making this a very successful FIRST season.

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