Left Picture : Team members, Shyla Simon (Left) and Catalina Vera (Right), smiling before a match in San Francisco. Right Picture: In the competition “pit” with team members Sara Vasquez, Jackson Korsgaard and Omar Munoz.

Bishop-Wisecarver is honored to be in our 11th year of sponsoring the FIRST Robotics Competition. This year, we are again sponsoring The Pirate Robolution team from Pittsburg High School in Pittsburg, Calif. – hometown of Bishop-Wisecarver!

Today, we catch up with team members Jackson Korsgaard and Catalina Vera who we asked to give a one-word response to each of the terms below, followed by a short explanation. Take a few moments to read about the hard work and lessons learned by this amazing team.

  1. FIRST Challenge 2018
    “Thought-Provoking” – This year’s FIRST challenge presented many challenges, each with unique solutions that we had the opportunity to approach, whether these solutions were a pneumatic claw to lift cloth-covered cubes or an intricate mechanism to deploy a ramp and allow another robot to climb on top of ours to score points.

  2. Team
    “Determined” – Our team, despite suffering many setbacks and challenges, was capable of persevering towards our common goal and remained motivated.

  3. Strengths
    “Resourceful” – Whenever a new challenge appeared, our team was able to find solutions that often involved applying ideas shaped by our team members to the issue at hand.

  4. Challenges
    “Theft” – Near the beginning of our build season, multiple items were stolen from a large storage container outside our building. While the monetary loss was relatively low, we suffered a huge blow to team morale.

  5. Goals
    “Support” – This year, aside from our primary goal of competing in this year’s FIRST Challenge, our team made a great effort in serving and supporting both our community and other teams. We mentored multiple FRC teams, two of which were new, and worked on many other projects, such as a small robot to help inspect a dam maintained by the Army Corps.


You can follow the Pirate Robolution crew at https://www.facebook.com/FRC5430/.