Hi Teams –

There’s a lot of important stuff in this email, especially if your team wants to compete in Nov or Dec. Please read carefully.

In this email:
Town Hall Recap and Q&A
Registration Eligibility, Process and Costs
Event Dates
Video Tags and Fair Play
Innovation Challenge for FTC
FTC Teams for FLL events – Ask Me Anything
Team Blasts – Team Help SessionsTown Hall Recap and Q&A
Here’s the link to the Town Hall archive page. There you can find the link to the slides and the video recording of last week’s Town Hall meeting. The questions from last week’s meeting have been entered into the Q&A page.

Registration, Eligibility, Process and Costs

In order to be eligible to compete in NorCal, you must have three things completed. 1) Paid your $275 registration fee to FIRST. 2) Have two screened coaches. 3) Complete a NorCal Survey about your team. You can check your team’s status from your status page link on the Team List next to your team number. The center section shows “Eligibility”. If it says “Yes, 2, Done” then you will be able to register. If it only shows 1 for screened coaches, you’ll need to verify that both Lead Coach 1 and Lead Coach 2 have been screened. These individuals can check from their FIRST Dashboard and can access the YPP screening from the drop down menu under the name in the upper right hand corner. If the survey isn’t complete, there will be a link to the survey. NOTE, both screening and payment to FIRST may take a few days to process to if you want to register for a Nov/Dec event, please take care of this quickly!!

Registration for Nov/Dec events will open at 7:00pm on Oct 22nd. Any eligible team will have a link to be able to register from their team’s status page next to QT #1. You will use this link to actually register. In the window from Oct 22nd through Thursday, Nov 5th, teams may register for any open spots in any of the Nov/Dec events as their first play. Starting on Thursday, 11/5 at 7:00pm, teams will be allowed to register for a 2nd play in Nov/Dec. The full registration process and schedule of what events can be registered for when is on the Registration page here. Note that once you’ve completed the registration page, you will be registered. You won’t get a further confirmation. Likewise, you are then obligated to pay for that event.

Costs for Remote events will be less than in-person events. The 1st play will be $100, 2nd play is $125, and 3rd play is $150. There will be a link to pay for the event after you register or you will be able to access it from the status page. When you make your payment, you will not receive a further receipt. IF YOU NEED A RECEIPT, please print that page immediately.

Event Dates
In a Remote Event, teams will have 6-7 days to play and record their qualifying matches for that event. Then there will be a day for judging that ends in an award ceremony. The dates listed on our schedule page are the dates of the Judging Event day. The matches will be played in the week prior to that date. We are clarifying the exact criteria with HQ and will update our schedule page to give the exact dates of allowed match play. For now, please be aware if you sign up for an event on Nov 22nd for example, your robot will need to be ready to play the week before.Video Tags and Fair Play
In order to encourage transparency, we encourage teams to post videos of their robot and their qualifying matches online. As a way for others to then find your videos, we encourage you to use tags to identify them. Our proposal for a tagging convention is on this page.

Along with these videos, teams are encouraged to sign a Fair Play for FTC Pledge. You can read all about it here. Kudos to teams 4345, 6949, 7303, 8381, 8404, 9656, 9784, 11039, 11575, 11689, 12635, 12869, 14341, 14504, 16306, 16532, 16533, 16944, 17759, 18219, 18223, 18254, 18272, 18373, 18340, 18466, and 18513 for already making this pledge!!! As teams make this pledge, they will receive stickers to proudly display their participation and will be listed here. This Fair Play for FTC is spreading throughout the entire FIRST community and we look forward to also displaying teams from around the world.

Innovation Challenge for FTC
Last week, FIRST announced a new challenge in which FTC teams can participate. Teams will have an opportunity to identify a real-world problem or opportunity related to our season theme and design a solution, build a business model, and deliver a remote pitch to compete for advancement. More details will be out in mid December when this officially kicks off. Read more about it here.FTC Teams for FLL events – Ask Me Anything
Like FTC, our FLL Challenge competitions will also be going virtual. These FLL Challenge events will be in December and January and are looking for an FTC team for each event to “come” and give FLLC teams a chance to be introduced to FTC. During the allotted time of 30-60 minutes, the FTC team can make a short presentation and have time for students to “Ask Me Anything” about FTC. Interested teams are asked to contact dianne@playingatlearning.org with your preference for weekends in Dec and Jan.
Team Email Blasts – Team Help Sessions
FIRST sends out FTC Team Email Blasts on Thursdays and this week’s blast included lots of good opportunities for teams to participate in webinars for the FTC Scoring system as well as other Remote Team Resources. There are also webinars scheduled to address Troubleshooting (10/21), Judging, Scoring and Gameplay. Here’s a link to the archive of Team Blasts. The emails come from the address firsttechchallenge@firstinspires.org. If you haven’t seen them, check your spam folder. There’s also a link from the archive page to sign up to receive the emails. Don’t miss out on these helpful resources!

Whew! Thanks for reading through this to the end!

As always, let us know if you have questions –

Dianne and Mark