The CocoNuts Robotics "News Feed"

After the controlled chaos of FIRST in Atlanta, the CocoNuts have settled into calmer, but just as important, pursuits: namely teaching the Northern Arizona University Summer Enrichment Program (NAU SEP) “Spirit and Opportunity” section for the second year in a row. The CocoNuts teach their “made-from-scratch” Mars rover based curriculum using LEGO Mindstorms Robot Kits (a.k.a. – FLL bots).

So, if you want to see the CocoNuts putting STEM into action, stop by the NAU College of Education, Rm 174, between 6-8 PM, June 2-8 or June 12-18.

GO NUTS!

Once again, through the overwhelming generosity of the community of Flagstaff and Northern Arizona, the CocoNuts will be attending the FIRST World Championships in Atlanta, Georgia!!!

This year we made it every team member’s individual responsibility to raise funds for their portion of the travel cost (plane, hotel, etc.) to Atlanta. So we decided to have a spaghetti dinner and raffle, and every member went going around town selling raffle and spaghetti dinner tickets. We received raffle item donations from over 50 local businesses, and we even had all our spaghetti/food related items donated as well! In total our spaghetti dinner and raffle netted $3700!! Members also solicited their friends and family for Arizona Public School Tax Credits to our team. We also had school hat days, car-washes and other miscellaneous fundraisers. As of today every member had funded their own trip ($480), with some going above and beyond (one by the thousands!).

We will be leaving Coconino High School at 4AM tomorrow for our 7:59AM flight from Sky Harbor in Phoenix to Atlanta. It won’t be until Sunday that we return, so no guarantees on new blog posts in Atlanta.

The CocoNuts are proud to represent Coconino High School—the city of Flagstaff—Coconino County—all of Northern Arizona—and the entire Southwest region at the FIRST World Championships. It is inspiring to see our outreach in our community be reciprocated by the kindness and support that our community shows for our team, and we hope to do you proud in Atlanta.

GO NUTS!

It’s official! The CocoNuts have once again qualified for the FIRST World Championship in Atlanta, GA through their reciept of of the Engineering Inspiration Award at the Arizona FIRST Robotics Competition Regional! This is the second highest award given out at regionals after the Chairman’s Award. This year the CocoNuts, in competition for the Chairman’s Award, were beaten by a decades old Hawaiian team, with a budget of upwards of $750,000 (in comparison to the CocoNuts $25,000)

Additionally, CocoNuts team member Tomas Zukowski was one of two recipients of the first annual Arizona FRC Regional Dean’s List Award. He will now compete at the international level with 89 other finalists at the FIRST World Championship for one of ten awards. Perks of winning this include: a waived registration fee for the recipient’s team, a week-long all-expenses-paid Leadership Seminar at FIRST Headquarters in New Hampshire, and a personal letter of recommendation from FIRST leadership to a college or employer of their choice.

In addition, the CocoNuts made it into the semi-finals of the competition as part of the fourth-seeded alliance, which was nicknamed “Team Arizona.” (Go Falcons and Team Caution!)

We’re steeping up our game in every aspect of our team!

When everything seems funny and you can’t stop laughing, you know it’s been a long day. We started off right after school frantically trying to finish wiring our bot so that we could drive our robot in our last school basketball game.   We did it though!

-burlymon

As we have decided as a team that we would like to attend the Duel in the Desert, we now have one less week to finish our  robot!  We agreed that it is probably a smart idea to go to this scimmage because we will only be attending the AZ Regional, and we want to have as much practice playing Breakaway as we can.  We are going to have to devide and conquer in order to get the bot built and the CA application finished, but we will manage!

-burlymon

Here we are, another weekend ahead of us and probably three days of 10+ hour build sessions.

The snow has let up enough that we were finally able to get our much needed bearings shipped up from Phoenix in the middle of the week, and our pistons for our kicker just came in today.  We have outlined all that we need to include in our Chairman’s Award essay, and decided on theme for our CA stuff this year.  Our robot chassis is beginning to take shape, and we are all feeling better about things because of it.  I wonder how far the Falcons (842) are in in their build, their prototyping proved helpful to us, and we did a bit of prototyping of our own.  Oh! And I came up with a new possible cheer for our team for this season.  Ready?!  “They ain’t no klutzes, they ain’t no schmutzes, O! Godness Gracious Me!  They’re the CocoNutzes!!!” Yeah, I guess it probably needs some work.

Hopefully, we get a bunch done this weekend!

-burlymon

GO NUTS!

Due to a week long snowstorm that brought the town of Flagstaff four feet of snow, school was canceled for an entire week. This meant that we were unable to do anything build-wise during the entire week. We were able to, on one day, coordinate a team chat on our new chat.fusd1robotics.org chat-room to (attempt to) discuss our Chairman’s Award submission. Finally, on Saturday, with the snow subsiding, the CocoNuts were able to hold their first build session of week of build season.

On a happier note, these snow days gave the webmaster time to revamp the website (until his internet was conked out) so check out the brand new Northern Arizona FLL Website, the redesigned Arizona FTC Website, and the CocoNuts’ new homepage.

The CocoNuts would like to unveil their newest methods for you to track their progress in the year of 2010. Follow us on Twitter by following us at twitter.com/cocorobo, or fan us on Facebook at the CocoNuts page. Just make sure to continue visiting this blog, as this will contine to have more thorough descriptions of what we’re doing.

After weeks of anxious waiting, the 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition game, “Breakaway”, was unveiled to the CocoNuts at the Arizona FRC Kickoff event at Brophy Preparatory Academy in Phoenix. Upon the end of two tedious hours of speeches, the CocoNuts rushed to get their FRC Kit of Parts and to begin their drive back to Flagstaff. Excluding the “who’s going to the rest area” misunderstanding on the way back up, everything went fine.

Upon the CocoNuts’ return, they inventoried all their parts, and found all of them in the right quantities and sizes, but with a few exceptions of course (*cough* e-ring *cough*). It was strange for the CocoNuts to use their very first room dedicated to robotics to inventory the Kit.

In all, Kickoff was a blast for all the CocoNuts, and soon they will all (rookie and veteran), experience the nail-biting, hair-pulling fun (or anger) that the FRC build season brings.

On January 8th-9th, the CocoNuts will be heading down to the Brophy PreparatoryAcademy in Phoenix to learn this year’s game for the 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition and to participate in all the accompanying workshops.