Team 61 Welcomes You!

Throughout the hallways of Blackstone Valley Tech, you'll find seventeen vocational shops; you'll find kids from thirteen surrounding towns in the Valley; you'll find a staff with a passion for technology; and, in the winter months of every year, you'll find all of this converging to create an incredibly effective robotics team. We are The Shifters, and you can find us shifting engineering into the next gear in Upton, Massachusetts.

    Robotics plays an important role in our school. Every one of our shops contributes in some way, and just about every student has been exposed to the robot. We go on field trips to the competitions, we show the robots off to potential students who are touring the school, we feature past robots in our pep rallies, and we even have a dedicated classroom dubbed the "Robotics Lab."

    We are part of a program called FRC, which stands for FIRST Robotics Competition. FIRST in its self is an acronym for "For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology," and their robotics programs range from grades K-12. We've been building robots as part of this program since 1995, and every year a different challenge is presented. From early January, we're given 6 weeks to build a robot around a newly designed game. This process entails designing, building, and testing our robot to the best of our ability over this limited period.

    Along the way, we face engineering dilemmas, programming bugs, and even electronic issues. Thankfully though, we have great team members and mentors, each of whom knows something about whatever issue we're facing. Our teachers and mentors are an endless source of knowledge and experience in most essential robotics areas and with their advice, our team pushes through any obstacles in its way.