The Olympia School District will host the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Olympia League  season beginning Saturday, November 23, at Jefferson Middle School.  Seventeen teams from Thurston, Mason and Gray’s Harbor Counties will begin arriving at 12:30 for check-in and inspections; matches will run 2:00 – 5:00.  This is the first of three League Matches which combined will determine these 17 teams’ seeding at the Southern Washington Inter-League Championships on January 11, 2014.

Teams will be competing in this year’s FTC challenge, “Block Party” (see this video animation.) This promises to be an exciting season with lots of strategy and technical challenges for teams to sort out and prioritize as they design and build a Tetrix-based robot programmed in Robot-C to tackle this year’s game.  The robot must perform autonomously for the first part of the match, then under two-person remote control for the remainder of the two-and-a-half minute match.  The competition takes place in a 12 foot square arena with four robots operating simultaneously as two randomly selected alliances.

Come join us to see “Robotics as a Sport” and cheer on your favorite team!!