Welcome to the 2024 FIRST Robotics build season! Last Saturday, our BEAST Robotics team came together in our new robotics field to prepare for the season’s Kickoff. This year’s competition, 2024 CRESCENDO presented by Haas, is an art-inspired season combining the concepts of STEM while encouraging creativity and teamwork. The team is very excited to start working on the new game!
The game itself, CRESCENDO, is a combination of two game design challenge concepts that appeared in the 2021 season. In CRESCENDO, two competing alliances are invited to score notes, amplify their speaker, harmonize onstage, and take the spotlight before the time runs out. Robots can score notes (foam rings provided at the “source”) by scoring them into the speaker, a metal chute angled 14 degrees upward.
During the first 15 seconds of the match, robots perform autonomously. Utilizing the coding that the Software subteam creates, robots leave their starting zone and begin scoring notes. Once the first 15 seconds are complete, drivers begin controlling robots for the remaining 2 minutes and 15 seconds. The robots are guided to the source, where human players drop notes for the robots to pick up and score at the amp and speaker. When two notes are dropped into an alliance’s amp, the human player can amplify their speaker for 10 seconds (worth more scoring points than an unamplified speaker) or repurpose a note scored in the amp in cooperation with their opponent, called Coopertition, to receive a Coopertition bonus.
As the time runs out, robots race to get onstage and deliver notes to their traps. Robots can also “harmonize”, or hang on the same chain, to earn more points at the end of the game. Human players can also choose to “spotlight” a robot by scoring a note on the chain’s microphone. At the end of the game, the alliance that earns the most points wins!
You can view the game animation for the CRESCENDO competition here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9keeDyFxzY4
This season’s kickoff was especially exciting, because the BEAST team was able to host our watch party in our brand new meeting space! Thanks to our successes in past years, the Elmbrook School District has built us a brand new, innovative robotics space. With this new field, our team can meet and work together as a group, test our robot, and so much more! BEAST Robotics is excited to share this field with other FIRST teams in the Elmbrook School District to encourage teamwork and collaboration within our community. We are so grateful for the Elmbrook School District and our sponsors for making this new meeting space possible!
FIRST Robotics has over 300 new teams that have joined this season, along with 50 veteran teams that returned from a break of a year or longer. There are teams participating from over 100 different countries. In our BEAST Robotics team alone, we have 85 students, 12 of whom are student leads. This year, we are proud to have almost 40 adult mentors, who will be helping us throughout this season!
We are so excited to start off this season strong! Let’s have a great season!
