I am excited to announce that we have kicked off this year's First Robotics Competition (FRC) preparations after an amazing result last year. We are busy this Fall Term upgrading our skills to get ready for the game release on 4 January 2025. It’s wonderful to see new members joining and of course many returning students on our roster this year. 

Mr. Sunny Ma

Last FRC season, our Senior Robotics Team attended the 2024 World Championships. Although we were exhausted, we still had smiles on our faces, memories to cherish, and a trophy to take pride of place in the cabinet! Our team achieved the Rookie All-Star Award, and the Wildcard Invitation to the FIRST Robotics Competition Championship in Houston, Texas in April. The event brought together almost 600 of the best FRC teams, from 58 countries, and over 46,000 attendees.

This year, we are aiming higher than ever before and taking some big risks. We are going to build an advance drivetrain, called a “Swerve” drive so that it can grace through the field like a dancer, adopt vision sensors so that our robot can see and recognize targets, and “Path Finding” programming so that our robot can self-drive (Tesla, don’t be jealous!)

As the only team in Hong Kong participating in FRC, we want to take the next step to grow this program in Hong Kong. We want FIRST to inspire other students in Hong Kong, as it has inspired us to dive deep into STEM and solve problems. So this year, we will be ‘reaching in’ and ‘reaching out’. That is, we will be reaching within our younger Carmel School students to introduce the baby steps in coding and to grow our upcoming stars, and we will also be reaching out to the wider Hong Kong community to spark some interest in starting a new FRC team. Stay tuned! 

Ayla, Grade 9