Wilsonic Boom Season Two: Biobuzz

Last season was Wilsonic Boom’s first ever season in the FIRST Tech Challenge, and it was one to remember. As a brand-new team, we reached the final as part of the Finalist Alliance at Regionals, then won the Sustain Award at the UK Championships. That was an incredible result for a rookie team, and it showed what our hard work and teamwork can achieve. Now, heading into our second season, we’re bringing everything we learned, fresh ideas and even bigger ambitions. Our debut was just the beginning, and we can’t wait to show what Wilsonic Boom can do next.

This season, we began by recruiting over twenty members into our two teams (Wilsonic Boom and Wilsobotics), through an extremely selective application process. With the majority of these recruits joining Wilsonic Boom, our first priority was to ensure they could immediately get involved with their respective roles in designing or programming and other team efforts such as fundraising and outreach. We are also focusing a lot more on increasing our influence this season, having already set up and running four clubs: Junior Robotics, Senior Coding Club, Robotics Industry, and AI Club. These clubs not only allow keen members of the Lower School to take part in robotics, but also branch out to other similar areas including Computer Science and AI, expanding our impact on the school.

After our recruitment and setup, we promptly began work on this year’s bot. As we begin this season’s BIOBUZZ challenge, we’re exploring how to turn our initial concepts into a cohesive robot that can perform under competition conditions. This season, we have decided to explore two different approaches: a simpler V1 design that prioritises consistency and reliability, and a more complex V1 that incorporates advanced mechanisms with a higher ceiling to potentially score more points. The simpler design gives us a dependable starting point, while the more ambitious version allows us to explore how additional features could improve our performance. By developing both approaches, we can compare their strengths and weaknesses and decide which ideas are worth pursuing. We aim to have our chosen V1 design built and tested by December.

In December, we will also participate in our first scrimmages at Langley Park School for Boys. Although we will only play friendly matches there, they will provide our first opportunity of the season to benchmark our robots against other teams, assess their performance, and identify areas for improvement ahead of our Regional competition. Next half term, to expand our Outreach further we will resume posting on social media and finish building our website, which you can check out the initial progress of here. We also aim to host weekly online and in person meetings with other teams or mentors. Additionally, we are planning a series of fundraising events, with a target of raising approximately £3,000 across both robotics teams. These funds are vital to support our ongoing development, competition preparation, and wider team activities.