History
For the 2006/2007 season, "Hanging A Round", Teen Technology founded a robotics team, Team Overdrive, as our main program. We were one of the hundred teams that made it to the World Championship. There we played up to the second quarterfinals. Though we hadn't won, by then we had really caught what we call, "the robotics bug," an "illness" that drives the team to want to excel.
Our subsequent year, "Quad Quandary", we really did. As soon as we finished our robot, we rushed to the Ohio competition. After being both the winning alliance captain and Inspire Award winner, we scrapped the robot that had blown away the competition for an even better iteration of it, one that would bring the whole game to the next level. With it, we handily won the New York competition. We then proceeded to become the World Champions of 2007/2008, with only losing three matches throughout the entire season!
The bug just got worse from there, and we set our goals higher than ever before. It was time to move on, so we decided to move to FRC. This first year of FRC, "Lunacy," was a huge learning experience, as we had to shift our minds from an 18"x18"x18" robot, to one the size of a washing machine. Our hopes for this season were to learn the ropes of FRC and be a contender on the field. We instead did exceptionally well as rookies in FRC, placing first seed and winning the New Jersey regional, dethroning the 3-year champion. From that we qualified to go to the World Championship in Atlanta, Georgia. There we won our division, got the Highest Rookie Seed award, and made it to the semi-finals at Einstein. This was an amazing season for any team, but even more so for a rookie team! Teen Technology had now grown from one team to two, including Power Surge, the FTC team, and Team Overdrive, the FRC team, with both doing exceptionally well and gaining recognition in countless places.
The next year, “Breakaway,” we stayed with FRC, but struggled more as the game was played on carpet instead of the slippery surface that we had had so much luck with the past year. Other teams who had been around longer knew the best way to arrange their drive train, how many wheels to have, the best type of wheels, etc. While many teams graciously helped us out, we still weren't up to par. Nevertheless, we did fairly well, and went to the Championships again. We played well, but didn't get picked in alliance selection. We still felt we had had a good season, however, as much was learned.
In the fall of 2010 we decided to go back to our roots in FTC as our head coach was no longer able to host the team’s lab in his garage. This year proved to be challenging, with all of the original team members graduated and a Head Coach switch. The biggest obstacle, however, proved to be the new FTC kit. The previous years we were in FTC the platform was Vex, but the year we moved to FRC, FTC switched to the Tetrix kit, so we had to learn as we go. We attended the Delaware Championship and were competitive, proceeding to the elimination rounds, and losing to the team who ended up winning the competition. We had won a qualifier earlier in the season and were subsequently invited to the New Jersey Regional Championship. There, despite our practice field and the competition field measurement discrepancies, we won our division and again advanced to the semi-finals. This year was exciting for us as we learned about the new platform and how to work together to overcome various obstacles as a team.
This upcoming year we will continue in the FTC competition, hoping to apply the lessons and skills we have learned from past years. We can’t wait to learn new things and see what this season has in store!
For more information about our previous years, please visit Teen Technology’s website.