A lot of progress has been made over the past week here in the Pirates’ Cove! All of the sub-teams have been hard at work. The climber sub-team is almost finished and after many revisions, the climber is mounted on the robot! The game-piece management team is working towards finished on their mechanism, and for the first time ever, we are working on a build book! The build book will be in our pit at competition, and be a sort of scrapbook of our build season. Programmers have been making huge amounts of progress with vision, getting us set up to use AprilTags this season!

We held our second Jr. Robotics lesson in the new shop this morning, with 11 junior engineers in attendance. They watched the kickoff video and tried to figure out how they would have solved the problem, then they built their own robots out of Lego. Afterwards they made paper-mâché starfish to decorate our pit at comp!

Scrimmage will be held at Corvallis High School on the 16th of February, time is to be determined, stay posted for updates! Teams from all over the state will be at scrimmage, running practice matches and getting some crucial drive practice in. The event will be open to the public, and the Scalawags hope to see you there!

The first two weeks of build season have been extremely productive for the Scalawags. We have been hard at work five days a week in the shop, prototyping, building and testing components for our robot for the 2025 game, Reefscape.

The first two days were all hands on deck for brainstorming, deciding how we want to play this game and getting broad ideas for how exactly we would score points. The team split into sub groups for designing game piece handling and climbing, two major components of the game.

We had two great ideas for game piece management. Two subgroups were formed to further prototype and research those ideas, while a third team set to work on the climbing mechanism and a fourth group got to work on designing our logo for the year and other imagery things.

The team came together and voted as a group on which game piece handling mechanism we wanted. Then we dove into production and manufacturing, with our art team and programmers hard at work to make sure that everything comes together for a functioning robot and an incredible pit for competition.