Lydia won the prestigious Dean's List Award yesterday at the Chesapeake Regional Robotics Championship in Severn, Maryland. She was one of only four robotics team members from thousands and thousands of students from Maryland, Virginia, and Washington D.C. This award is the biggest honor an individual robotics team member can receive. It is based on academics, knowledge, skill, citizenship, and leadership. We are super proud of her! She has brought lots of attention to our small team from Western Maryland. Lydia will be invited to attend the World Championship to be held in Texas in April.
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Our team is headed to the Chesapeake Regional FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics Championship presented by Capitol One once again! It is on Saturday, February 11, 2023 at Archbishop Spalding High School in Severn, Maryland. We are one of the fortunate 52 teams from Maryland, Virginia, and Washington D.C. to attend this prestigious event.
Special Presenters
Learn about STEM Sponsored by Allegany Robotics, “The A-Team” Online presentations about STEM related fields Hear and learn from experts Learn about careers and awesome projects Sign up for the event using the form below. Keep up to date at our website or check us out on Facebook: facebook.com/alleganyrobotics Link and info to join online presentations will be posted at our Facebook page or emailed to you Schedule of STEM Speakers Tuesday, January 10 at 7:00 PM Hunter Dennison: Mechanical & Aerospace Engineer. PhD student from West Virginia University. He will discuss current research on aerospace engineering conducted by WVU and take questions about college. Tuesday, January 17 at 7:00 PM Ben Strozykowski: Cyber security consultant with a focus in DevSecOps at Layer 8 Security. He will talk about “Application Security” as it applies to the software industry as a whole and the current landscape of the software industry. He talks about the challenges he helps groups face on a daily basis and what to expect if you become a software engineer. Tuesday, January 24 at 7:00 PM Eric Clark: Program manager at Northrop Grumman. He will discuss the work that many different types of engineers do and offer advice on how to pursue a career in engineering. Want to know more about engineering? Want to be one? Be sure to attend this special event! Recently we have made many changes to our social media platforms. Now we are posting almost every day, and our changes have yielded positive results.
The first change we made at the beginning of the season, was replacing our previous website link with Linktree. This Linktree allows viewers to access our website, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube all in one place! We feel that this is an awesome addition to our social media and encourage everyone to use it to support us across multiple platforms. Our new habits of posting daily, has managed to bring even newer content to our website. In fact, we have something new to see every day, excluding Sunday! - Mondays are now ‘Meme Monday’. Tuesdays are now ‘Fact of The Day’. Wednesdays are now ‘Member Spotlight’. Thursdays are now ‘Activity Day’. Fridays are now ‘Fact Friday’. And finally, Saturdays, our most popular day, is now ‘Reel Saturday’! We have seen significant improvements in our engagement since converting to this new platform. On Instagram, we reached out to over 5,600 people just last month. We had a hit reel reach 3,366 views with 84 likes and 7 shares, a record high for us on Instagram! We also had two additional reels hit over 2,000 views! Additionally, we had a single post become shared 5 times, which brought us even more new followers that are interested in robotics. On Facebook, we have reached over 9,200 people! We even have one reel that has been viewed by over 5,900 people, and the number continues to grow! Chick-Fil-A even hosted a Spirit Night for us on October 24 to support our team. We made signs containing our name and message, and stood outside the restaurant for people to see them. We experienced an amazing amount of support from our community, and we are grateful for their support. We would like to extend another thank you to Chick-Fil-A in LaVale, MD, and to everyone else who has helped to support us now, and over the past few years! Thank you for all that you do, your support is always appreciated! Elizabeth Clark Public Relations Manger We recently posted a video on our YouTube channel (The A-Team Robotics (FTC 8395)), highlighting the importance of safety in the robotics shop and proper safety procedures. In this blog I am going to take you on the journey of making this video.
I was approached by our coach, Mr. Dennison after finishing the driving distracted video, asking me to make a video on basic shop safety. The idea was to make a video that us and other teams could use as a resource to teach their members on the importance of shop safety. After finding my volunteers Jude Gibson-Thoele, Emmanuel Kujenga, Violet Strozykowski, and Nick Smith, we gathered on one Tuesday evening afterschool to film the video. We started the process with a read through the script. Reading through the script before filming is important so that everyone is familiar with their role, so that we can gather ideas, and also to save time. Then we proceeded to film the narration lines, discussing how to stay safe in the shop. Once those lines where filmed, we proceeded to film the scenes, showing what not to do. We are a high energy team and they were excited to film those scenes! Those scenes where shot in a safe environment under adult supervision. That was the end of the main part of filming! Next came sorting and name all of the clips. This is the not-so-fun part. So I turned on a old Formula One race while I sorted and named forty-seven clips. During this step I discovered that sometime during filming Jude’s lines, the camera got knocked out of focus bad enough that two clips where usable, since Jude was unavailable at the time I asked alumni member (who is also my brother), Ethan Clark to make a guest appearance and redo the lines. He graciously accepted and we refilmed those two lines in our garage. We also did struggle with focusing since others helped with the camera and I didn’t realize they where out of focus. Lastly is editing all of the clips! This is the longest part. This video took about eight hours to edit. I have recently started using a new professional editor called Olive, which has been a learning curve. So to prepare for this video I made a personal edit. By doing that I learned how to add effective transitions, adjust speeds of clips, and many other things that I used in this video. I ran into issues with background noise. With this new obstacle, I did some research and learned how to reduce background noise with a program called Audacity. By reducing the background noise, it made it greatly easier to understand what is being said. All of the titles and end cards where made using two programs called Phonto and IbisPaint X. From there was putting it all together to the video you can watch now on our YouTube channel! This was a really fun video to make and we all hope you enjoy it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_7IoGSdW6w Elizabeth Clark Public Relations Manger To improve with communicating with our community, our team is making several changes to our social media efforts. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and a new website (this one).
Our Facebook page (facebook.com/alleganyrobotics) will now feature more than news about our team. We plan to include fun posts, activities for kids, and cool engineering related challenges/news. We just started a new YouTube channel. Plans for our channel will include clips from our competitions, videos of us testing some of our robots, tutorials, and more. In addition, people can follow us at Twitter (twitter.com/a_team_8395) and Instagram (instagram.com/alleganyrobotics). Our team competed at the Chesapeake Regional Robotics Championship on Saturday, April 9 at the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia. This was a two day event but we didn't participate in the Freight Frenzy game until Saturday. The day before we visited the Nauticus Science Center, Hampton Roads Naval Museum, and the U.S.S. Wisconsin.
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