At the start of any competitive season there are kinks to be ironed out, strategies to be refined, and rules to be learned or clarified.

For the Solon Robotics Team, the start of a new season includes temperamental robots and learning a completely new game (“challenge”) and scoring system. To work out the kinks and get competitors and scorers used to this year’s challenge a scrimmage with eight other teams was held Thursday, October 16 at the Solon Community Center.

The Robotics Team designs and builds their own robots, resembling over-sized Erector Set creations, programs them with laptop computers, and controls them with video game controllers for the purpose of completing a challenge created by the First Tech Challenge (FTC) program. In addition to solving the challenge, Solon’s teams compete against other teams while forming an “alliance” with others.

The challenge changes each year but typically require the teams to place as many objects into a designated space as possible within a set time limit, while navigating around the opposition’s robots in the process. This year competitors need to place rubber balls into an elevated hopper in order to have them line up in a chute. The catch is having the balls, green and purple in Solon’s case, in a specific sequence of three balls (green-purple-green, purple-purple-green, etc.) with points awarded based on adherence to the sequences.

The scrimmage gave the teams an opportunity to brush up on their strategy, find and correct any deficiencies in their programming or robots, and gave the scorers, referee, and volunteers an opportunity to work through the new challenge before actual competition.