FRC Build Season is closing soon

The date for FIRST Robotics Competition teams to ship off their robots is drawing nearer. I’m in the Tahoma Robotics Club, and I am getting to see our robot come together. We hope that our robot will do very well at the Portland and Seattle Regionals, taking us to the National Competitions at Atlanta.

The Build Season started on January 9th, with the season kickoff. On that day, FIRST announces the game robots are to play in competition that season. After the announcement of the game, our club went back to our school to think of strategies to play the game this year. We get 6 weeks to design and build the robot from scratch.

Our team has a fairly long way to go, and only 8 days to get there. I’m feeling that we’re going to finish just barely ahead of time, and we’ll do very well at competitions.

Kent started school finally

Yep, today was the Kent School District’s first day of the 2009 – 2010 school year.

The source of the delay in state was a teacher strike, which our own G. Liu discussed in a post right here.

The pure source of the teacher strike, the absolute root of the issues G. Liu stated as the source of the strike is money. The Kent School District’s lack of it. Kent lacks money to pay for building refurbishments that add classrooms, to pay for new teachers, and other issues.

The other problem is that Kent has way too much property covered by them. This specific point means that their schools are packed. There’s also 4 grades packed into the high schools, and 6 packed into elementary schools. Tahoma’s scheme of K-5 in Elementary, 6 and 7 in Middle, 8 and 9 in Junior High, and 10-12 in Senior High works very well. It provides a gradual approach to High School for students and gives a more gentle narrowing of schools. Tahoma has 4 elementary schools, 2 middle schools, one junior high and one senior high (as well as a “High School Alternative”). Kent has 28 elementary schools, 6 middle schools and 5 high schools.

Kent School District is about to be the next GM, going through an awkward “restructuring” to solve their problem. (GM still makes lousy cars though.)

Hopefully though Kent can survive at least until December without further strikes.