Week 4 Sponsor Feature: James Blakeman Construction

With every year comes our need to practice the game which requires building a field.

 Every year, we build a duplicate field at a second location that we call the STEM center.  This area was given to us by the Shelton Board of Education. The field itself requires a substantial amount of wood in addition to many other projects we need to complete during the build season.  Blakeman Construction is a residential house and commercial building company based in Shelton, CT. They have graciously donated thousands of dollars worth of 2x4s and other sizes of wood to us. This has allowed us to create any necessary pieces for our field, like the HAB and the Rocket, which are pieces for this year’s game.

Usually, we do all of our building and robotics related activities in Shelton High School.  But we do have a second location for our robotics team. It is called the STEM center and it is a part of our Shelton Board of Education building.  The team was generously given access to us a portion of the space by the Board of Education. At the STEM center, we set up some of the field components to practice and make sure our robot is able to perform all of the game tasks.  It proved very useful to us last year as there were some faults in the robots performance that were corrected only by testing it on the practice field. Programs can also be tested for the first time before competition season. Last year was the first year we had access to the STEM center and our competition performance showed how much we improved from the ability to test the Robots performance.