With the build season halfway over, it was time for the Green Machine’s annual open house. Each year, FIRST Team 1816 hosts a day for the community to come and see what our FIRST robotics team is all about, in addition to viewing the progress on this year’s robot. SPARK (Sponsor, Public, Appreciation, Recognition, and Kudos) Day this year was a success! More than 130 people from the community stopped by Edina High School to learn about FIRST Programs, see our robots and hear directly from team members how “we” plan to solve and win this year’s competition! Parents, teachers, and even the Mayor of Edina stopped by to view our progress. This year, we also had many FIRST Tech Challenge families attend. It looks like many of them are eager to join our team as incoming sophomores next season! On display were the works of all the different sub-teams, from Facilities , which made all the field elements, including a tower and the multi-level of Frisbee goals; CAD showed how they are using Solidworks to design and test our robot; programming demonstrated code in all three languages (JAVA, LabVIEW and C++), while build showed off the 2013 chassis! Everyone had a chance to get out of the workshop and celebrate all that is done during the busy six-week build season.
