The Robo Lions have started the school year off strong with a group of new members, they plan on taking over the year and making it the best one yet.

Our head programmer, Jason Wu, has won the hearts of the students of Peachtree Ridge High School this fall and was nominated for Homecoming court. On September 26th, he surprised the entire school and got the title of Homecoming King for 2014. This goes to show that Robo Lions aren’t only capable of building robots and programming, but are also capable of bridging different circles into a unified whole.

Peachtree Ridge Robotics have been attending every home game that is held against Peachtree Ridge High School’s football team with the T-shirt Robot named Jeff to rouse the intense crowd and cheer the team on. They plan on continuing their participation in sporting games by later attending the basketball games as well and teaching younger students the ropes of the t-shirt robot to continue in future years. The community is essential to the Robo Lions’ ethics and they will make it a priority to continue to expand such outreach in the near future.

The official VEX season has begun and the Robo Lions now have six individual teams that consist of a minimum of five members each who are at a steady pace to finishing the robot. Each team is following the organized calendar and are reaching the point of finishing their manipulators and will finish their robot by the 21st of October. Wiring and programming will start the first week of November, nearing the VEX Competition held at Peachtree Ridge High School.

On October 4th, Peachtree Ridge Robotics headed to the Georgia Robotics Invitational Tournament and Showcase with their 20114 FRC robot for the Aerial Assist game that got them to the National Competition in St. Louis this past year. They brought freshman, previous members, and alumni to experience a portion of the exciting competition that occurs in spring semester. Parents and sponsors were invited to join as well observe the friendly-competitive spirit that FIRST encourages. The Robo Lions entered the competition with two drive teams and strong enthusiasm, which brought them to the finals. Although they didn’t win the GRITS Competition, Team 1261 is even more driven than before to enter the spring semester and leave a mark.

Team 1261 has given a new meaning to outreach; they gave rookie team, Lovett a fully complete robot to compete with at GRITS, which brought them to the finals of the competition as one of their alliances. The Robo Lions look forward to developing this new relationship in the upcoming year and to help Lovett prosper as a rookie team.

To start off the year, the programming classes are consisting of lessons toward Easy C in order for the individual programmers for each VEX team to do VEX programming when it comes the time in mid-November.

Business Team is currently working on multiple projects that are going toward the outreach and funds of the team. Members of the business team have been separated accordingly in order to complete different goals: getting new sponsors, forming fundraisers, applying to grants.

It has only been the first few months of the semester, many things lay ahead for the Robo Lions.

This summer, the Robo Lions have made it a mission to broaden their horizons as a club and for their students through new opportunities to harness skills and experience.

The Robo Lions began a programming class that allows future Robo Lions as well as current interested members to learn the basics of programming. To ensure the application of programming, they have also collaborated with fellow robotics team, Walton, on the logic of programming and certain thought processes. Approaching the school year, the Robo Lions are beginning to expand their knowledge into syntax and more will come with the continuation of the class during the school year. The class is developed to challenge the students to utilize concepts in order to enforce them in the near future.

In addition to the programming class, the Robo Lions have invested in making their own programming board to allow programmers to practice and test code without a complete robot at hand during FRC competition season.

The t-shirt robot that the Robo Lions debuted in the fall of 2013 underwent upgrades and revisions that included the additional CIM motors as well as a hinged door to improve the robot’s effectiveness during future community events.

In the aspects of VEX, there are two individual VEX groups that have taken on the task of accomplishing the 2014-2015 season game, Skyrise. These two team’s have taken two different approaches on the VEX competition with a scissor lift and a linear lift that is attached to a 4-bar lift that will hopefully bring either one to victory. The objective of starting earlier than they have years before is to challenge the students to create unique designs and engineer past basic concepts.

On the business aspects of the team, the team has taken up the task to finish the sponsor plaques and deliver them gradually and will finish up going into the school year. The sponsor money that’s been graciously given to the Robo Lions will soon fund for materials, projects, and outreach in this coming year. On the other hand, the progress of the business plan that the business team has efficiently worked on throughout the summer is now close to completion and will hopefully declare the prosperity of future years.

The Robo Lions’ summer has been action packed and foretell greater opportunities and advances of the 2014-2015 year and plan on continuing to motivate their students to strive for greater success.

From March 27th to March 29th, 2014, the Robo Lions competed at the Peachtree Regional in the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, GA for their second regional of the season. Though they did not strike a win as they did at the Palmetto Regional earlier this year, they won the Industrial Design Award, a prestigious award sponsored by General Motors that “celebrates form and function in an efficiently designed machine that effectively addresses the game challenge.”

The team from Suwanee, GA gained additional experience and knowledge considered invaluable by members on the team. “We didn’t win, but what’s important to take away from our losses is the mistakes that we made in order to prevent them from happening again,” said freshman Caroline Means, one of the two members in charge of safety on the team. “That’s how we learn and grow both as a team and as people.”

Teacher-sponsor Mary Rutland, who many call a second mom, also has high hopes for the team. “Sometimes I feel even more disappointed than the students when we don’t quite get what we were shooting for, but it’s all part of the learning process,” she said. “Sure, we will lose here and there, but everybody really is a winner when it comes to FIRST, and that’s what makes it such a great program.”

On April 24th, the team will head to the FIRST World Championships in St. Louis for a chance to win it all.