Hershey’s robotics team, Krypton Kougars, started preparing for the 2023-2024 robotics competition season.

They compete in the FIRST Robotics Competition, or FRC, for short. The kick-off was streamed on Twitch on January 7th last saturday. 

This stream included an animation of this year’s game formal, release of a four hundred page manual, extra materials that would aid the teams in competition, and other various things. For this year, teams have to build robots that will need to shoot cubes among other things. 

The entire team gathered on that Saturday for the kick off to discuss possible strategies, “what we want our robot to do and what we don’t want our robot to do” as Anshi Paul, the strategy lead for Krypton Kougars and member for 3 years, said.

“It was exciting, it was obviously chaotic, but we had it very organized.” Paul said. 

She explained how much of the team was new to robotics this year, as “around 70% of the members hadn’t experienced a kick off before”. Because of this, the leaders prepared multiple activities to ensure that they could make the most of kick-off, including a mock-kick off a month prior. 

“I saw a lot of them actually try to contribute which was nice to see,” Paul said when talking about the actual kick-off. 

This spirit of community is actually very important to the robotics competition, as it’s two main values, coopertition(cooperation + competition) and gracious professionalism(being kind to your competition). They focus on not only working with the members in your own team, but other teams as well. 

“If you see another competing team, and it is broken, you give them that part,” Paul said. 

Krypton Kougars placed 2nd at the world competition last year, and they plan to build on what experience they gained. 

“We’ve built some goals this year that build off last year’s performance,” Paul said, “and we definitely have high hopes.”