For Saline’s Snack Time Engineers, the road to the Netherlands was built one part at a time: student work, mentor guidance, family support and help from local sponsors.
Snack Time Engineers, FIRST Tech Challenge team No. 34672, competed June 17-20 at the European Premier Event at Indoor-Sportcentrum Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Official FIRST results list 105 match participants at the international competition.
The Saline robotics group includes students ages 11 to 14, according to information provided by Snack Time. To prepare, students spent about six weeks designing, building and programming a competition-ready robot. Their work included computer-aided design, CNC milling, 3D printing and Java programming for both autonomous and driver-controlled portions of the game.
In the Lovelace Division, Snack Time finished 17th out of 53 teams in qualification rankings with a 4-4 record.
The trip also gave students a chance to collaborate with competitors from around the world. According to Snack Time, members worked with alliance partners from several countries, adjusting to different communication styles, strategies and approaches to robot design. They also helped others in Eindhoven, lending batteries to a team from Hong Kong and assisting a group from Greece.
For Lincoln, the team’s head of manufacturing, the invitational left a strong memory.
“A strong memory for me from the invitational is strategizing with our alliance partner from Argentina on auton and teleop game play before our match against teams from Hungary and Kazakhstan,” Lincoln said.
Elijah, a lead programmer, said he also enjoyed seeing the host city outside the venue.
“I really liked walking around in Eindhoven,” Elijah said. “It’s so much more walkable than the U.S.”
As a community-based team, Snack Time relies on local sponsors, mentors and families to help students build, compete and travel.
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