Hello, all! As the end of the year draws nearer, so do the competitions! Both the build and programming teams have been practicing and filming the robot doing the challenges that FIRST has set up. We spent an entire weekend recording our attempts, and we even live streamed on twitch (to see our past livestreams, follow us on twitch at mythicalrobotics.) 

While our build and programming teams have been working hard on our robot, the operations team has been hard at work on another project. We are proud to announce that, starting on May 6th, we will be hosting multiple engineering talks, where someone working in a STEM field will come to a virtual meeting to present a topic that they have expertise on, and their experiences in their STEM field. We will be hosting these events throughout the months of May and June, and our series will conclude on June 17th with an Aerospace-themed panel. To learn more about these events and sign up, go to the STEM Series section of our website.

Meanwhile, some of the members of NoMythic have been meeting twice a month to discuss our team culture and how we can improve it. We know we want to do more to make this team a welcome and inclusive space for all, so we brought in two lovely people from the consulting agency Just Move to help us design workshops to present to our team to help us achieve that goal. We received the money for these discussions through a diversity grant we applied for in February.

Finally, we are excited about an upcoming meeting, where we will nominate future captains! We look forward to seeing what these nominees will bring to the table and how they will help shape the future of NoMythic!

It’s February, and along with the days getting colder, the GRS Idea Lab is getting busier, as we’re happy to say that we’re meeting in person again! We’re building a robot. The CAD designs we started last summer are finished, and we have sent some of those parts to our sponsor, Quality Tool, to get them fully made! In addition, we’ve been machining some of the parts ourselves.
While our build team is busy making the robot, our amazing programming team is busy programming it. We are especially proud of our newest programming recruits, as they have started the process of coding their very first robot. We are getting ready to send out electronics boards to them to practice on.
The lovely operations team is hard at work making future plans for build season and beyond. We have applied for a diversity grant so that we can have workshops to make this team a more diverse and inclusive space.
Finally, the team has started meeting as a whole on the first friday of every month to keep us all informed and cohesive.

Well, build season has officially started, and it started with a bang! Yesterday (January ninth,) we had an all-team meeting to kickoff the build season and the game for 2021.
We started off with introductions, then played a Kahoot to test our knowledge of the game. After that, we watched the official live kickoff video from FIRST that went over the challenges for this year. There are still a lot of unknowns, with the ongoing pandemic, but we at NoMythic are ready for whatever comes our way in 2021.
After a lunch break where we each looked over the game manual and at-home-guide, we reconvened to go over any questions we had about the rules for the game. After that, we discussed whether we wanted to focus on a robot designed more for the at-home challenges or the competition. We eventually came to the conclusion that we wanted to focus on the smaller things designed for the at-home challenges. We then broke into breakout rooms to discuss what we wanted the robot to be like, and to ensure we knew about each challenge. Finally, we came back together for the last ten minutes of the meeting to recap and set our work to do before the next team meeting.
We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us in 2021, but we at 2491 NoMythic are looking forward to the hardest fun ever.

We’re currently working with the incredible robotics team KnightKrawler to make face shields for front line workers. We have access to several 3D printers, some owned by the team, some owned by mentors, which we are using to print the frames for face shields. If you are able and interested we are currently accepting donations to help us pay for the filament at our Donate page. If you need face shields, or just want to check out the amazing KnightKrawler and the work they’re doing, you can do so on their website.