By MyFM’s Marissa Santos – Sense and Sound Robotics, a community-based FIRST Tech Challenge robotics
team, won the Massachusetts State Championship on March 9 and is advancing to the World
Championship in Houston next month to represent the Commonwealth. The team is made up of
8 th through 12 th graders from surrounding communities who compete in the FIRST Tech
Challenge, a robotics competition where students learn to think like engineers. Teams design,
build, and code robots to compete in an alliance format against other teams. Robots are built
from a reusable platform, powered by Android technology, and can be coded using Java. A new
challenge is presented annually, requiring a new robot build and hours of testing and problem
solving. Team members build 2-3 times per week in a lab in Franklin, MA, where they are
mentored by local engineers. The students are responsible for all aspects of the robot build and
coding, including tracking their efforts in an engineering design notebook. Older students also
mentor younger students in physics, math, computer programming, and engineering to create a
successful design.
Each match is three minutes in length and includes a 30 second autonomous period where the
robot must be preprogrammed to complete certain tasks, followed by a two and half minute
driver-controlled period. In this year’s challenge, robots had to pick up and stack different
colored multi-sided pixels in various patterns on a backboard. During the last 30 seconds of the
match, the robot had to launch a paper airplane into a landing zone and then suspend themselves
from rigging on the playing field.
As a community-based team, the Sense and Sound Robotics does not receive any funding from
the school or town, and so they have launched a fundraising campaign to raise the $33,000
necessary to compete at Worlds. Expenses include team registration, travel for the team,
transport for the robot and supplies, and additional robot parts needed to compete. Both corporate
sponsorship and individual donations are welcome. Sense and Sound Robotics is a 501c3
organization. You can donate to the team or learn more about sponsorship at
www.senseandsoundrobotics.org. You can read more about FIRST Tech Challenge at
www.firstinspires.org.
Franklin Robotics Team Wins State Championship, Advances to Worlds
