Ready for new season

STANWOOD - This year will mark the fifth that North Cedar is offering a robotics team.

Earlier this month, North Cedar robotics Coach Vicki Hamdorf took eight team members to the First Tech Challenge (FTC) kickoff party at Center Point-Urbana.

All of the students and coaches got to go to different workshops at the FTC event, including some about prototyping, designing and building robots, programing and community outreach.

North Cedar team members split up and wen to as many workshops as possible. After the workshop sessions, students would report to the rest of the what they learned and did. After lunch break, all of the teams and coaches went into the gym to hear Rebecca Whitaker, FTC Affiliate Partner, and a representative from Rockwell Collins talk about the new season.

After Whitaker's presentation, members viewed the new game called Cascade Effect.

There are 160 plastic balls in Cascade Effect - 40 are baseball-sized and 120 are golf-ball sized. Each robot can start the match with two balls, one small and one large. Each alliance - two randomly selected teams are paired together - has three rolling goals and each goal is a different size, one is 30 centimeters tall, one is 60 centimeters and the last goal is 90 centimeters.

The objective of the game is to stack the balls inside the rolling goals, the higher you get the balls in the tube the more points the team earns.

North Cedar's teams will compete with 204 other teams in the state of Iowa, only the third state in the nation with as many teams.