Indian Time - A Voice from the Eastern Door

The Salmon River and Massena high school robotics team, officially called FRC Team 229 “Division By Zero,” competed in the FRC “Ultimate Ascent” game this year.  They had six weeks to design, build, and program a robot to play ultimate frisbee.  The team actually built two robots (#229 and #4124) and the twin robots were both designed to shoot frisbees across a court into targets. Both robots were also built to hang from a horizontal bar on a tower for bonus points in the game.  

The robots were both taken to the FIRST Granite State Regional in Manchester, New Hampshire in early March, where the team competed against 43 other teams from all over the US and Canada.  4124 was actually the third best performing robot at the competition according to all the scoring data. 4124 was the first pick in the elimination matches and was selected by the number one robot to be in its alliance.  229 was the number eight robot, but was picked by the fifth robot to be in its alliance.  229’s alliance lost in the second round of quarterfinals, but the 4124 alliance dominated the field by winning the quarterfinal, semifinal and final matches to win the regional.  

 229 went to Boston, Massachusetts this past week to compete in the FIRST Boston Regional against 50 other teams from across the US, including teams from California and Alaska, as well as teams from Canada and Brazil.  229 was seeded 10th at the end of the 84 qualifying rounds and was selected by the fifth seed team to go into the finals. This alliance beat the 4th seed alliance in both quarterfinal matches but lost to the first seed alliance in the semifinals.  However, the team did win the Judges Award for their excellent engineering design.

 4124 has now qualified to go to St. Louis, Missouri, April 23rd to the 27th for the FIRST World Championships, like they did two years ago.  Here they will compete in one of four divisions of hundreds of teams from all over the world.

 “Overall, it was a life-changing, awesome experience!  Our team really had their eyes opened to how hard work, for 12+ hours a day, can be so much fun,” commented Darcie Fregoe, Robotic Team Coach.

Salmon River Robotics Team members are: Hunter Bashaw, Danielle Bowles, Charles Breason, Shawn Brown, Morgan Cartier, Katelyn Cook, Nolan Cooke, Jordan D’Oliviera, Christian Duncan, Kristin Feimann, Alex Figueroa, Sako George, Thomas Hill, Dylan Holden, Samantha MacDonald, Rohahes Mitchell, Kyle Neufang, Christian Oliveira, Mackenzie Phelix, Dillon Point, Lauren Ransom, Chris Taylor and Trina Thompson.

The Massena Roster includes: Ivan DeLosh, Luis Estevez, Jacob Lavalley, Schuyler Conto, Evan Fregoe, Emily Lynch, Meghan Villnave, Thomas Weitz, Jason Avery, Jennifer Beaudoin, Taylor Brault, Megan Havican, Savannah Hays, Connor Paquin, Bryce Ryan, Corey Snyder, Jacob Weed, Amber Arquette, Brianna Barley, Honni David, Meranda DeLosh, Ryan Parkinson, Zachary Robert and Shane Chartrand.