The robot that the Aries built was a “crane-like machine” to the judges.
The 2023 First Robotics Competition (FRC) San Francisco Regional took place from March 16th to 19th at Saint Ignatius College Preparatory School. Team 8169 “Aries”, formed by 18 Taiwanese students from Kangshan Senior High School (KSSH), Kaohsiung Senior High School (KSHS), and Kaohsiung Girls’ Senior High School (KGHS), visited San Francisco to compete against 41 other teams. To support the talented students, Education Division TECO in San Francisco met the team members and cheered up for them.
There were 42 teams in the San Francisco Regional, all of them were from California except the Aries. Jeff Kuo, the Dean of Academic Affairs of KSSH and the leading teacher of the Aries, stated that they had received support from the local teams even before the arrival, helped them solve many key issues such as the batteries for the robot and the tent for their contest booth. “The team started to work intensively since the third day of Lunar New Year, in order to build a robot that could ‘pick up a yellow cone and a purple cube and move them to a designated place’”, said Kuo, “The robot was out of control during testing and caused some damages, but the team learned that the only way to build a functional robot not only requires knowledge from textbooks, but also to connect them and accumulate experience from practice”.
The Aries won the Judges’ Award in the Regional, the judges were impressed by the team with “the unique challenges that they had to overcome, including language barriers and limited access to the FRC community, and they developed a unique robot as a result.” Sophie Chou, the Director of Education Division TECO in San Francisco gave recognition to the students’ skills and the courage of self-challenging, while encouraging the team to inherit the experience from this competition, keep it up on doing research and become a role model of other students in the future.
KSSH is in Kangshan District in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, which is well-known with its mutton hotpot and screw manufacturing. To promote the culture of Taiwan and Kaohsiung internationally, the team named themselves Aries, and designed their logo with the inspiration of a ram and some screws. Most of the KSSH students graduated from local junior high schools, and chose KSSH based on their passion for technology and robotic field. They spent most of their after-school time and Sundays learning the knowledge and skills of robotic design and manufacture, including engineering design, industrial design, machining, programming, artificial intelligence, system on a chip, computer aided design, etc. In order to reach the goal of study for the sake of application, the students designed and created their own robot to reflect the knowledge they learned. The students also established a robotic technology research club to spread the knowledge and manufacturing skills of robots on campus, while building their active learning attitude and ability. This strong project attracted students from KSHS and KGHS to join the Aries, and result in an outstanding performance in the international competition.
Team 8169 “Aries”, formed by 18 Taiwanese students from Kangshan Senior High School (KSSH), Kaohsiung Senior High School (KSHS), and Kaohsiung Girls’ Senior High School (KGHS), visited San Francisco for the 2023 First Robotic Competition San Francisco Reginal.