Throughout the spring, Triple Helix students and mentors used socially-distanced and virtual meeting spaces to compete in Infinite Recharge at Home, a set of skills challenges laid out by FIRST in lieu of traditional tournaments.

We are proud to announce that after one last late night at the Peninsula STEM Gym, we’ve wrapped up our submissions and sent them in to FIRST!

Because of our hard work, our results are among the best in the world.  We currently stand [1] at 4th place in our randomly-assigned group of 29 teams, just behind teams from Seattle, Long Island, and Windsor Locks CT.  We’re also currently [2] the highest-ranked Virginia team, and somewhere in the top 50 out of all 1100+ teams competing.

These results are quite spectacular, especially considering that we’ve done our work completely openly, updating our youtube channel every time we have a new “best to date” score to share.  You can find all the materials we submitted to FIRST– a presentation about the software development work we’ve done, a flyer about our robot, and much more– at our publications site team2363.org/publications.

Thanks to all the participating students and mentors, and everyone who helped us do such great work during a weird time– especially the parents and our sponsors!  We look forward to an upcoming FIRST Chesapeake award ceremony on May 4, and a restful offseason full of…

• Competition with our FPV quadcopters
• software development leveraging what we have learned through these skills challenges
• Recruiting new students and mentors to our team
• Reopening our Menchville HS workshop for business as usual as soon as we can!

Nate

[1] Official scores and rankings will be available from FIRST on April 23.
[2] These are unofficial rankings taken ahead of this afternoon’s submittal deadline.