Welcome to FIRST STRONGHOLD, the 2016 FIRST Robotics Competition Game! On January 9th, teams around the world watched online as the new game was revealed. FIRST STRONGHOLD is a medieval tower defender game in which alliances select defenses to fortify their side of the field, and then compete simultaneously to breach the opponent’s defenses and capture the opponent’s tower.

Over the past week, we have been focusing on selecting a design and strategizing for this game. We broke off into small groups on January 10th at our Game Review to discuss strategy for this game, and mechanical teams began prototyping different designs during the week.

On the engineering side of the team, the Design Selection Team has been working on evaluating designs for the robot. To aid in this effort, the Game Strategy and Scouting Team finalized our strategy for this game early in the week and has been going over updates in rules posted by FIRST. Meanwhile, the three Mechanical Teams have been working on prototyping designs for the chassis and mechanisms while the CAD Team works to integrate the different parts of the robot’s design. The Electrical and Electronics Team has checked which controls are currently available for use on our robot. Since the final design for our robot is still being created, the Controls and Programming Team has been teaching new students about Java, setting up GitHub, and working on getting new chassis to run. The programmers also got Margarita, our 2012 FIRST Robot, working. Our final engineering team, the Field Team, has been tasked with creating the multitude of field pieces necessary for practicing this game. In one Saturday build day alone, they bought material, built the sally port, built the base for all the defenses, built the moat, and started fabrication on the rock wall.

The business teams have also been hard at work this past week. The Chairman’s Team has been completing essay questions for the 2016 Chairman’s submission. The Business Plan Team is preparing a submission for the Entrepreneurship Award, and they have recently completed edits for the business plan and other online submissions and are beginning work on the pit and judge presentations. The Finance Team helped the Business Plan Team out by creating and updating a budget chart for the business plan, along with talking about the sources and uses of funds. Meanwhile, the Marketing Team has been writing the January Newsletter and planning for the Meet the AdamBots Event, while the overall Project Management Team has worked on scheduling, planning how to run meetings, setting up FIRST Choice to get free parts from FIRST, and going over the process to order build materials.

The last four business teams focus on media related to the team. The Digital Media Team has updated the website and added new picture. The Animation Team rendered the safety animation and is currently stitching it into a video to submit for the Safety Award. The Imagery Team has been researching new imagery related to the medieval theme of the game, and cleaning up folders to prepare for this season. As per usual, the Photo/Video Team has been visual documenting everything with pictures and videos, and is currently focusing on editing the video depicting Week 1 of the build season.

Overall, this past week has been very productive for the AdamBots. We are extremely excited about FIRST STRONGHOLD, and we cannot wait to play our first matches in a few short weeks!

Written by Saniyah Shaikh

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