Motivate Award Winner — Team Binary Bots

About our team

Hi! We’re Binary Bots 003 from London. We’ve been a FIRST Tech Challenge team in the UK for three years now, and we are passionate about robotics. Our team members come from a variety of backgrounds, but we all have one thing in common: our passion for STEM. All of our team members see themselves going into some sort of STEM-related career in the future, which was one of the reasons why we decided to start this team in the first place. Robotics is one of our team’s passions, so we’re always excited to see what FIRST has in store for the season.

How we worked together

While we all share a passion for STEM, we find it important to utilise the individual strengths of our members. Some of us are better at social media or programming, and we think it’s important to learn from those people and lift them up so that our whole team improves. We also like to make sure we have a great team vibe, just so that everyone feels comfortable and open!

A significant challenge

This year we were unable to meet in person for most of the season due to Covid-19, like many other teams throughout the UK. As a result, our build season was cut short, with meetings in the beginning of the year and end of the year. As a result, in the time that we did spend together, we tried to make the most of it by being as efficient as possible. This ultimately resulted in less testing and modifying of our robot than we would have liked, however we still think that our robot turned out pretty well!

We were also concerned about the outreach we could do with Covid. In past years, we have traveled to help other teams in person, however, due to quarantines and government restrictions, that was not possible. Despite this challenge, we were still able to set up online conferences with other teams, where we got the opportunity to learn more about them and their journeys as well as share ideas and strategies for the upcoming competition. Additionally, we were able to mentor several FIRST Lego League and FIRST Tech Challenge teams over Zoom in weekly meetings to stay connected with our community.

Winning the award

Winning the award was awesome! We didn’t expect to win anything, so it was a big surprise when we did. We’d like to thank all of the people who supported us on our journey, including all of our teachers who taught us engineering concepts and made us into the people we are today, as well as our former teammates who we hope are doing great things in university and beyond.

What’s next for our team

We’re sad to say that this is our last season as a FIRST Tech Challenge UK team. Many of our team members are off to attend university, and we wish them all the best luck! We hope that the values of FIRST and the experiences that they had with our team will stick with them as they continue their journey. Finally, our legacy will be continued in the teams that we aided and helped found throughout our time together. Keep up the good work!