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Robbinsville High School’s FIRST Robotics Team 2590 Nemesis went global.

Sponsoring a fun and exciting engineering experience in Haiti over the holidays, Nemesis shared their love of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) with the House of Hope Orphanage. Who would have thought that a high school club could make a significant educational impact in a developing country?

Nemesis alumna, Jolia Thadal, currently studying at the Rochester Institute of Technology, joined the New York Society of Cosmetic Chemists (NYSCC) on a mission trip she co-organized to the House of Hope. The small but mighty orphanage cares for over 70 orphaned and abandoned children and simultaneously operates a K-13th grade school program where all expenses are covered by public donations.

On behalf of Nemesis, Thadal hosted an engineering camp modeled after Discovery Day, a highly successful day camp held annually at Robbinsville High School where children learn about the engineering design cycle through open ended challenges. Nemesis, the technology sponsor of the trip, supplied the resources and training needed to engage 43 children from both the orphanage and surrounding areas. Through the camp, entitled “Discover Engineering: Let’s Build and Be Creative!”, Haitian children were exposed to basic engineering principles in a fun and collaborative environment. Utilizing their creativity and problem solving skills, the campers worked in small teams to address engineering challenges.

The day camp was a massive success: the children treasured their experiences, as well as the t-shirts, hats, and goody bags that Nemesis provided. Robbinsville High School could not be prouder of Thadal and the team for their success in inspiring future generations outside of United States to develop a passion for STEM.

When asked about her experience, Thadal gushed, “I have traveled worldwide for many different reasons, but this trip was certainly one of the best experiences of my life. I was touched by the effort exercised by all the children to complete their projects.”

Nemesis is eternally grateful for their sponsors’ support of the team’s goal to mold the future STEM leaders of the world: Robbinsville High School, NAVAIR, CCL Label, Lockheed Martin, Investor’s Bank, NYSCC, Triangle Copy, Robbinsville Education Association, Robbinsville Education Foundation, RAS, McGraw-Hill Financial, Design Tree, and Knowledgent. Sponsors, family and friends are welcome to come out to Hatboro-Horsham High School for our first District Event on March 2nd through 4th. Admission is free.

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Nemesis Starts Robbinsville High School’s First FTC Team

Apoorva Savanur

Fifteen students, a challenge, and a robot. In October 2017, Robbinsville High School’s (RHS) FIRST Robotics Team FRC 2590, Nemesis, started a First Tech Challenge (FTC) team 14020, Nemesis Prime. FTC is a branch of FIRST for students from ages 12 to 18. These students develop important skills in the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) fields. Each year at kickoff, a new game is revealed and the season begins.

This year’s challenge, Relic Recovery, features two alliances whose goal is to organize foam blocks into one of six patterns to score points. FTC freshman Rugved Dikay explained the game as “a journey through a Pharaoh’s Tomb”. During the first thirty seconds of the game, known as the autonomous period, robots are controlled by pre-programmed instructions. The final two minutes, the robots zip around at the drivers command.

In preparation for their first competition, Nemesis Prime sought out help from members of Nemesis to give them a head start. Students from Nemesis aided Nemesis Prime members in areas of coding, driving, and building the robot. Mentors from the marketing team taught them how to present with confidence. All involved were rewarded a sense of leadership. Student mentor Matt Began shared his thoughts on Nemesis Prime, “Watching them persevere through obstacles gave me hope for FTC’s future.” Nemesis also shares their facilities and donated both financial and material resources to ensure the success of the FTC inaugural season.

Starting Nemesis Prime was a bold move for Nemesis. Their first competition was nerve wracking, and exciting. Members were swallowed by panic when the robot failed to work during the autonomous period. With fire in their eyes, the drivers managed to make up for what they lost during the driver operated period.

Nemesis Prime learned some valuable lessons so far this season. FTC freshman, Ashrith Pagedemarry, shared, “I have gotten a lot of hands-on experience and learned a lot from this program.” Nemesis looks forward to the rest of the FTC season and wishes Nemesis Prime the best of luck.

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Nemesis Energized for a New Season

After much excitement and anticipation, FIRST kickoff weekend arrived on January 7th, with 2023’s newest challenge: Charged Up. Live from FIRST headquarters in Manchester, New Hampshire, this new challenge engaged and motivated the minds of Nemesis 2590. This year's challenge revolves around creating tech innovation to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all. After the challenge was finally announced, the team was launched into a state of excitement. The 2023 build season has officially begun!

After the team read through the game manual to gain full knowledge of the challenge, we split up into several brainstorming groups, all to examine the game and discuss how we could approach this feat.

During these breakout sessions, members used statistical analysis, ranking the actions that the robots could exhibit, in an effort to help with the design of the robot. Eventually, team members and mentors came to a consensus on each Robot action. Next up, each group would decide the rankings and strategy of these actions. An overall consensus was eventually reached and Day 1 finished with the team splitting up into small groups to review potential designs of the robot actions, with a focus on maximizing game piece placement efficiency.

On Day 2, after the ranking of tasks and strategies were decided, the “How’s” of Nemesis’ approach were discussed. Team 2590 split up into their respective subteams, and eventually came to an agreement about how designs were to be implemented on the overall procedure. This rigorous challenge would require each and every member of the team to step up, and embrace the spirit of building a brand new robot for this year's challenge.

Kickoff weekend for Nemesis 2590 had the team rally around a difficult challenge, through perseverance and resilience, the team was able to overcome the obstacles together. The team not only worked hard, but enjoyed every moment of solving problems collaboratively, from the rigorous discussions of strategy, to the designing of the robot, to how the team could utilize different mechanics for the robot. Creativity, teamwork and determination abounded this kickoff weekend, and we can think of no better way to start another exhilarating season with FIRST Robotics Competition.

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2023 Week 1: Business Journal

The FRC 2023 season has officially begun, and Nemesis has been busier than ever in the first week! The business team has been preparing for the annual Nemesis sponsor night by updating information and planning presentations to keep our sponsors informed. We have also been preparing and sending invites for this event. We are very excited to meet our sponsors and present all of our hard work so far.

In addition, our team, sponsor, and outreach showcases are being updated with new photos and awards from our last 2022 season. Our new members are hard at work ensuring that these showcases are kept updated.

As a team, we are preparing workshops for First Lego League teams made up of elementary and middle school students. These workshops include a variety of activities designed to keep students engaged and excited about STEM. We are also getting ready for our State of the Schools event, a club fair where parents can see the accomplishments of our team; this keeps us connected to our community. In addition, our Chairman’s team is diligently working on their Impact Award presentation, putting in their best effort to win this prestigious award. We are also busy creating buttons with our logo and a 2023 game-specific design to pass out to other teams during competitions.

Our logistics team has been finding restaurants for the FMA District Championship and are making sure that meals are being provided for our team during meetings. Our media team is currently in the process of using Photoshop to design labels for our showcases as well as updating the website with information and photos of newer members. Our finance team is looking and applying for sponsor grants, creating our business plan, and reconciling the bank account. Finally, we have been preparing for our robot demonstration in the local library as well as setting up an outreach event in collaboration with the Trenton Urban Promise organization. Overall, it has been a successful start for the business team in the 2023 season!

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Another Dynamic Discovery Day

After the Covid-19 pandemic, Robbinsville High School is back to hosting the Nemesis classic, Discovery day. On the fifteenth and sixteenth of October, Nemesis hosted two , discovery day camps, managing to reach over One-Hundred students. Every year, the Nemesis FRC team hosts an event, open to elementary and middle school students, where the campers work with current team members to give them a fun and enjoyable introduction to STEM. The program has them complete a plethora of age-appropriate STEM challenges, meant to offer a stimulating, but fun, experience for the students.

This year, there were two challenges, each targeted at one of the two different participating age groups in the event. For the younger students (second through fourth grade), the challenge was to make a robot that could kick a ball and a goalie to stop the ball from reaching the edge of the table using Lego Technic and RCX motors. The older students, from fifth to sixth grade, were challenged to use similar NXT and Lego Technic pieces to create a robot that would “bowl” a wiffle ball into a set of concentrated pins.Once they successfully completed this, they were challenged to code the robot using NXT software to bowl the wiffle ball with just the press of a button.

The campers were split into groups of 2-3 students, and were mentored by current members of the FRC team. The student-mentors assisted the campers in creating the best robots possible, while still understanding the science behind the challenge, and allowing the campers to maintain creative control. . Elan Ronen, a junior on the Software Team, mentored three young students. Elan admired his students’ ingenuity. “Their communication and perseverance struck me the most. They were experimenting with the robot design in the beginning, but after extensive amounts of collaborative brainstorming, they were able to come up with a design. The issue was that their design kept on breaking -- still, after many trials, these students were able to utilize the engineering design process to create a great design.” Elan, and many other student-mentors, found that recovering from adversity is what helped these students grow the most; “Whether it be through the build or code, the students never gave up.” Robert Gao, Design Lead, stated, “As time went on, they really got better at cooperating and problem solving together and I sort-of…just…got to sit back and watch. It was really cool.”

The young students were also given other opportunities to explore robotics. The campers got a chance to look at a robot built by the local FLL team “IDK”. The campers also got a chance to drive Iris, Nemesis’ robot from the 2022 season. Students were amazed by Iris’ smooth movement, and complex design. The robot driving was a student favorite, with almost half of the campers doing the activity twice!

This discovery day played a significant role in introducing young students to robotics and STEM. It was great to see all the students leave with a smile on their faces, and a newfound love of robotics and STEM.

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Nemesis Battles Through Another Brunswick Eruption

Another year, another Brunswick Eruption! That’s the off-season competition hosted by North Brunswick High School, this year on November 12th, 2022. This year, 51 team members were able to come, which was very good attendance! We had a lot of amazing experiences as well as some great takeaways, and plan to use them for future seasons!

Before our first match, we learned that there wouldn’t be any warm-up matches since teams needed extra time for calibration. This meant that our robot, Iris, and our drivers wouldn’t be properly warmed up for the competition, and we wouldn’t know how Iris would behave during the actual qualification matches. We also had a few issues concerning the robot, such as Iris’s limelight mount being broken or the ball intake being jammed, which definitely proved to be problematic during the qualification matches. Nemesis's first match was the 2nd qualification match of the competition, but unfortunately, Iris wasn’t performing well, and we didn’t make most of our shots.In our 3rd match, however, things started to look up for Iris and the team. We made some good shots into the hoop, and rarely missed shots during that match. Even though our alliance lost that qualification match, we proved that we were able to stay in the game. During our 4th match, we got a few shots in and were able to go on the middle rung during the endgame. Nemesis ended the qualification matches with a rank of 8th place (out of 35).

After the qualification matches, it was time for the alliance selections! Nemesis chose teams 1155 (SciBorgs), 102, and 2601 (Steel Hawks), based on our scouting, which is when team members take notes on other teams’ robots’ performance, and everyone did a great job with that, even the inexperienced rookies.

Finally, it was time for the much-anticipated quarterfinals! Our alliance, the blue alliance, was facing off against the red alliance, which was made up of teams 3142 (Aperture), 5895 (Peddie Robotics), and 533 (The PSIotics). We made shots one after another, trying our hardest to recover from our rough start, but in the end, we lost to the red alliance 2-1 in the best of 3 rounds.

After many tough and challenging matches, Nemesis persevered through them all. With the help of our fellow alliance members, we were able to beat teams left and right, all so that we could take a shot at the quarter-finals with the help of our alliance members. Nemesis was very proud and grateful to have made it to the quarter-finals, and we know that we will improve and do better in the next competition!