After the 2021 Cargo Connect season, The Bricks Awaken have retired. We had a great 7-year run, but we’re aging out, and it’s time for bigger things! Most of us will be in high school next year, and some of us will be joining Technophobia FTC 15005.

We’re looking forward to the Cargo Connect season. Here are the materials.

Season launch video

Robot game video

The Bricks Awaken is excited to be competing in the 2020-21 “RePLAY” season! Everyone from last year’s team returned, and we picked up one new member, so we have a full team of 10 this season.

Challenge materials can be found here.

Our problem this year is cracks in sidewalks in public spaces. Our innovative solution this year was plastic sidewalk panels made out of recycled polyethylene. Polyethylene is the least recycled plastic. We would take the polyethylene from central Illinois so it would cost less.

In December, we competed at our qualifier in Peoria. We had a great day! All of our judging went well, and our robot behaved. We ended up in 2nd place in the robot game, won the project award and advanced to state! We will compete again in January at the Tesla State Championship.

“The Bricks Awaken” has openings for new team members for the 2019 season. If you’re a student in grades 4 through 8 in the East Peoria area, contact us if you want to learn more. We plan to finalize our roster over the summer to be ready for the challenge release date of August 1st.

Over the weekend, we competed at the Illinois Tesla State Championship. We finished 2nd in the robot game with a score of 242. We also won a Core Values trophy (our first!) for Gracious Professionalism. Also, we were chosen to present our project in front of the entire tournament during the closing ceremony.

At our qualifier in December, we were Grand Champions and won the robot game with a score of 246.

This was our winningest season ever!

On November 17th, 2018, we competed at our first scrimmage of the season. We scored 156 points and took first place. In practice, we were capable of 242 points, but we didn’t really get a good run at the competition. We’re taking what we learned there and are back to the practice table to work on our reliability!

Early in the season we decided what our roles would be for the year i.e: Chiefs of our main three rolls (Building, Project, and Programming), Spokesman, Outreach expert, different leads for sub things needed for building/programming/project. During the high of the season, we met with many other teams to collaborate, and help one anther. A few of these teams were: Mindstorm Madness, Thinkanators, and Morton Master Builders. We went through quite a few different ideas when coming up with our ideas for programming and the project. We went through four main different ideas for the project, the four being: drought, Water pollution, Illinois water problems, and combating water waste. We ended up deciding on what we named ‘The Aquarius Wizard.’ Currently with our state competition drawing near, we’re buckling down and honing what we have and trying to get a higher score in places that we scored lower on at our qualifying competition.

Good luck to everyone who made it to the state competition, and we’ll see you there!

Yesterday, we had our third qualifier, and we had a great time. Our robot was consistant, and we got the robot performance award and the project award for the first time. We will advance to state.
Our friends the Thinkinators got robot performance and grand champion awards. Bolin Builders got robot performance and project awards. They will both advance to state.
Our new friends System Overload got the judges award.
We wish our new friends the Morton Masterbuilders luck in their qualifier next weekend.