We are in the process of forming a 2020 BEST Robotics team to compete in this year’s BEST Robotics team competition. The Shelton State Hub is not participating this year due to COVID-19 so there will be no in-person competition in West Alabama. However, the BEST Robotics organization has developed a separate program to enable affected teams to participate in a “virtual” competition in which they send the field to each team so teams can simultaneously live stream their robots on the field to competition headquarters. They also have a virtual Marketing competition to replace the in person Marketing competition. The marketing competition sometimes appeals to students who are interested in STEM but aren’t that interested in the engineering side of the competition and/or building a robot. In addition to these two traditional activities, they are adding several other side competitions that range from Website Design to a Minecraft Challenge.
The actual competition takes place on 11/19/2020, giving us about two months to design and build a robot. There is a bit of a commitment that needs to be considered before signing up. This is an engineering project with a hard deadline. Early on we may need to meet twice a week for planning and designing the robot. Later as the students start building the robot and the competition deadline draws near and the engineering and marketing teams run into problems, some of us may need to meet more often to ensure completion by the appointed time.
Here is a link to more information on this year’s BEST Robotics competition: https://www.bestrobotics.org/site/documents/2020/Outbreak_Classroom_Information.pdf
If you are interested in participating, please read and fill out the attached survey and return it to Phoebe Markin at clmarkin@earthlink.net as soon as possible (by 9/9/2020) . The competition kickoff webinar is on 9/18/2020, so we will want to meet as a group before that. The survey will help us gauge interest and determine what we need to discuss in our first pre-meeting.