The 2025 FIRST® Robotics Competition (FRC) kicked off on Saturday, Jan 4th. REEFSCAPE presented by Haas was released across the world. This video shows the game play for this year’s competition:
Our kick-off was held at the Binghamton University Watson College of Engineering & Applied Sciences Fabrication Laboratory.
 The Fabrication Laboratory had plenty of space for our full day of viewing the streamed FRC videos, reviewing the released documentation, working in small groups and as a team to discuss the rules and strategy of the game, and do human simulations of the game play to get a better understanding of the nuances of the game. The Team kick-off started with viewing the official release of the 2025 REEFSCAPE game streaming from FIRST®.
After viewing the video stream the Team broke into working groups. A worksheet was created with questions about the game. The worksheet made references to the videos and the official rule book which is 160 pages long! The worksheet is created to help the Team members engage in detail with the material so they become intimately familiar with the game play and rules.
After the group work period we all gathered into the conference room to discuss the game play and rules. The discussion allowed everyone to start understanding the finer points of the game such as how the various scoring modes affect the strategy for the robot.
We then moved to performing the “human simulation” of the game. We taped off ½ of the game field with the locations of the game piece distribution, robot start/end area, and scoring area. Team members were selected to simulate the actions of the robot as we imagine they collect, move, and deposit the game pieces into the scoring area. We ran the “human simulation” multiple times. After each run we discussed how the actions and movements of the human robots affected the ability of the human robot to score.
With the completion of the “human simulation” we ended our kick-off activity. We are now into an intensive 6 weeks of design/build/test to prepare for our first competition at the Hudson Valley Regional, March 5-8. We are diving into more details about the nuances of the game, develop scoring strategies, and begin to develop concepts for the robot. In parallel we’ll begin building mock-ups of the field elements that will be used for testing. On a side note, one of our mentors was the head of the electrical team of the Binghamton University Rover Team: Binghamton University Rover Team | Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science The mentor gave an up close and personal look at the rover under development.
Building and competing the robot gives the students a unique opportunity to develop a very complex project. The students are exposed to a very compressed lifecycle that many real world projects go through. It gives them a chance to see the many different skills and disciplines that goes into making a competitive robot. But this takes funds to buy the materials and components for the robot and travel costs to the competition. Help the students participate in the robotic revolution! Visit this website to donate: Team 2053 GoFundMe