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What is LHS Robotics?

LHS Robotics includes Livingston High School's registered FTC Robotics Team and our LHS Robotics Club. The LHS Robotics club was created in September 2009 and is composed of around 20 LHS students. Our FTC team (Team #3415)(aka The Livingston Lancers) was started in Spring 2009 and was able to compete in numerous scrimmages, winning awards at many of them, and hosting the their own at their school, Livingston High School in Livingston, NJ. The team is currently competing in the 2009-2010 season and has competed in many scrimmages as well as at the NJ State Championship Competition at NJIT on February, 6 2010. Recently, the team competed at the New York City FTC Championship Competition held at the Jacob Javitz Center on March 13, 2010 and placed in the top 6, was nominated for the Connect Award, and won the Inspire Award. Lancer Robotics FTC Team #3415 is one of 48 teams in the country who won the Inpire Award and is one of 4 teams from NJ that will be competing at the FTC World Championship at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, GA from April 14-17. We hope to start an FRC team in about 3 years.

How We Started:

LHS Robotics was started in March of 2009 when Jim Novotny, a technology teacher at Livingston High school and the District Supervisor for Technology in the Livingston School District introduced a Tetrix kit and a challenge to create a working robot to 4 of his students. These students were part of his Technology and Design for Science and Engineering 2 class and included Stephen Bier, Connor King, Isaac Lynn and Andrew Goldberg. Stephen was the Programmer and Connor, Isaac, and Andrew were all Builders and Designers. While these students were figuring out how to build a robot, Jim Novotny had registered an FTC Robotics team for Livingston High School. This was when this small robotics team became known as LHS Robotics FTC Team #3415 (The Livingston Lancer FTC Robotics Team). After a couple months of hard work, the team was able to reach their goal of creating a working robot.

First Scrimmage: Monty Madness

The team was able to register for a scrimmage at Montgomery High School in Montgomery, NJ called Monty Madness. Isaac Lynn and Stephen Bier were the only 2 team members able to attend, accompanied by advisor/mentor/teacher Jim Novotny. The students quickly realized that they had a lot of work ahead of them. They were unfamiliar with the 2008-2009 FTC game and did not build their robot with the game in mind. During robot inspection, the 2 team members discovered that their robot didn't quite fit the 18x18x18 sizing requirements, had illegal materials on their robot, and didn't have the correct software to run their program. Luckily, since it was a post-season scrimmage, none of that really mattered at the time and the inspectors allowed the robot anyway. Isaac and Stephen borrowed a laptop with the correct software for the competition and were able to compete. Before coming to the scrimmage the team members were able to read some of the game manual and gained a sense of what the game was, but were still unprepared and learned more about the game as they competed. Since their robot was designed and built without the game in mind, it was very unique compared to other teams robots. The robot was not very good offensively, but was remarkably successful with defesive strategies. At the end of the qualifying rounds, the team was 13th out of 19 teams. Novotny made sure Isaac and Stephen didn't give up and knew that they had to promote themselves and their robot to the top 4 teams who were scouting for alliance partners. The 1st place team, Power Surge, liked the uniqueness of their robot and appreciated their defensive capabilities and chose them to be their alliance partner. Stephen and Isaac graciously accepted and went on to compete in the semi-finals and then the finals. Their robots uniqueness and defensive strategies proved to be very useful in the semi-finals and finals. The 2 teams turned out to be a great pairing and ended up Winning 1st place. The team won their first award, being a 1st place alliance member. This motivated the team to continue competing and gave them the inspiration to hold a scrimmage at their own school in June.

Livingston High School Scrimmage:

After disecting their robot and fixing some of the problems they encountered during the Monty Madness scrimmage, the team went on to host a scrimmage at Livingston High School on June 27, 2009.

NOTE: This page is currently under construction

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