Introducing the MAR Newsletter!

Jim Carr, MAR Executive Director, has put together a newsletter to discuss the various changes that are occurring within organization and to highlight team outreach activities. The first issue can be downloaded here.

Waitlist Practice for 2015 District Events

MAR has scheduled seven District events for the 2015 season. The minimum capacity for each event is 31 teams, which will provide space for 108 teams. Each event also has a reserve capacity to accommodate team growth. With 8 rookies and nearly 88% of 2014 teams already confirmed to return, we expect to utilize much of the reserved capacity while still providing room for additional plays by MAR and non-MAR teams.

Important Youth Protection Program Reminder

Today, FIRST issued the below email blast containing an important reminder about the screening requirement for lead mentors as part of the new Youth Protection Program.

As of Tuesday (9/2), about half of our PA teams and more than half of the teams in DE and NJ had yet to complete the process for one or both of the listed mentors. If you are in anyway affiliated with one or more FRC teams, please reach out to your team’s lead contacts to ensure your team will not be at a disadvantage when registration opens. Each team must have two listed mentors who have completed YPP screening.

2014 MAR Championship Housing Update

The MAR Outreach Committee has contacted the hotels within a 15 mile radius of Lehigh University. The following is a list of the hotels and their projected prices, before taxes. MAR is not using Steele Meetings or other travel agencies to hold rooms at various hotels because we wanted to keep the cost as low as possible.

The hotels along the MAR bus shuttle are marked. Schedule to follow. We expect to run a few shuttles in the morning and then in the evening. If there is a roboprom or other MAR event on Saturday night, we will run the shuttle to/from the event from all of the shuttle hotels.

Week 1 Rankings Posted

The Mid-Atlantic Robotics 2014 FRC season- Aerial Assist- is underway! Congratulations to all 78 teams that competed at Hatboro-Horsham and Mt. Olive- the first week of any new season brings some start-up challenges, and we may have gotten more than our share this year. Despite technical problems and the threat of nasty weather, our event coordinators and volunteers got the job done.

FIRST® AERIAL ASSISTSM 2014 Robotics Game Unveiled

MANCHESTER, N.H., January 4, 2014― Inventor and FIRST® Founder Dean Kamen launched the 2014 FIRST® Robotics Competition (FRC®) season today with the Kickoff of a new robotics game called AERIAL ASSISTSM before a crowd of 400 people at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, N.H., hometown of FIRST Headquarters. Nearly 70,000 high-school students on more than 2,700 teams in 92 cities around the globe joined the 2014 Kickoff via live NASA-TV broadcast and webcast.

“The students who participate in the FIRST Robotics Competition are not only building robots; they are building character, self-respect, and relationships with their peers,” said Dean Kamen, president of DEKA Research & Development and FIRST Founder, adding, “Winning the game is fun, but the importance of FIRST is that you’ll get much more out of it than you put in, and it’s going to change the rest of your life.”

The 2014 game, AERIAL ASSIST, is played by two Alliances of three teams each. Alliances compete by trying to score as many balls in goals as possible during a two-minute and 30-second match. Additional points are earned by robots working together to score goals, and by throwing and catching balls over a truss suspended just over five feet above the floor as they move the ball down the field.