France's first FTC regional, hosted by us

On 18 January, our school had the great honour of hosting the very first FIRST® Tech Challenge regional competition in France. Thank you to Robotique FIRST France for choosing Notre-Dame de Bellegarde, and thank you to the school for supporting us in this project.

The members of our FRC team went above and beyond to run a flawless event: setting up the venue, welcoming the teams, inspecting robots, refereeing, hosting the matches and managing the queues.

An all-Robo’Lyon final

Team 23147, the RBL Tech Makers, rose to the challenge and finished first after the five qualification matches.

For the playoffs, four alliances are formed based on the qualification rankings, and we were lucky enough to have an all-Robo’Lyon alliance. It made it all the way to the final, where it lost a hard-fought battle to the winning alliance by just 5 points. What a final!

The RBL Tech Makers and the RBL Snoops both qualified for the national competition on 22 March. A great performance that makes us very proud: congratulations to everyone!

The Tech Makers’ review

After the competition, the team took stock of its robot:

• the intake struggles to collect samples from the submersible when there are too many;
• the climber malfunctions and the claw has too much play, which kept the robot from climbing in every match, including the final;
• the drivers needed more practice.

“Despite these difficulties, we see many positives in our robot and in how well our team worked. Now we need to build a second version of our robot, Crazy Frog, to perform even better!”