Turning Kids into Science and Technology Heros
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| Welcome | Minnesota FTC hosts the Minnesota FIRST FTC Championship Tournament and is supported by the Prior Lake Robotics Club KING TeC. Winners of the tournament advance to the World Competition in Atlanta Georgia and get to compete with the best robot builders from around the world. We hope you enjoy the many useful links and informative references for your FIRST Robotics experience. On these pages you will find information on how to start a team, what it takes to compete in an FTC tournament, where to register and purchase the base FTC robotics competition kit and much more.
The Minnesota Championship Tournament will be held this year at the Prior Lake High School on March 6th, 2010. The game announcement from FIRST will be on September 12th, 2009 so there should be plenty of time to design and build your robots with time left for practice and strategy development. We hope to have a couple of group sessions to help new teams get up and running quickly this year and look forward to a great season.
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| The Competition | This year’s game competition will be announced in September, 2010. Every year there is a new game design and the announcement is always highly anticipated.
To see last year’s game and get a sample of the fun, click HERE.
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| Team Resources | The following are helpful links for use in the competition.
You must register with FIRST in order to be authorized to compete in a Championship event and to order the regulation competition robot kit.
To Register your team with FIRST and be authorized to compete and link to the supplier to order your base robotics kit click HERE.
Registration for the Minnesota FTC Championship Tournament will begin in the fall. To view last years registration for referrence, click HERE
Link to Lego Tetrix to order additional parts click HERE.
To Link to the FIRST FTC Robotics Forum click HERE.
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| Starting a Team | Starting a new team is fun and exciting. The robot platform for FTC is very robust giving the students great depth in their creative opportunities and students will learn real programming with three language options to choose from. Teams form an alliance with another team and compete against other alliances. These alliances change so that your current alliance partner may become your next opponent. This builds spirited competition and cooperation among all participants. Team sizes are limited to 10 students plus their mentors and coaches allowing students to specialize, divide and eventually conquer.
The costs in starting a new team are moderate, especially when compared to an FRC team.
The following sample budget is for a typical new team, purchasing one FTC Competition Kit and participating in one event. If your team chooses to purchase an additional kit and/or participate in multiple events, the fees would vary accordingly. The Minnesota FTC Championship Tournament fee is $275. Other venues will be different. Travel costs will vary due to the distance and time needed to travel to an event.
2009 FTC Program Registration Fee $275
This fee enables teams to participate in official FIRST Tech Challenge tournaments. Teams can participate is several tournaments with a paid "Event Registration" fee to each event.
2009 FTC Competition Kit $999
This fee buys your base kit of parts including the NXT micro controller and licenses for three programming languages.
Event Registration Fee $0 - $300 (MN $275)
Travel Costs - food, lodging, gas, etc $0 - $500
Team T-shirts (optional) $0 - $150
Additional kit items (optional) $0 - $500
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