RiverRage is the oldest active post-season competition that is held at Memorial in October, presented by Manchester, NH Area teams- C.H.A.O.S (131)/ Crusaders (238)/ PowerKnights (501). There were 33 teams from all over New England that came to compete, which included the three host teams. The event has a Halloween-theme so many teams and robots came dressed in costume. We loved hosting the other teams and had a great time at the event.

The wall mural started with painting the entire wall black, as it was previously different shades of white. After we painted the entire wall we began to lay out our team’s logo. After we got the rough layout we had our mentors do the fine details and we love the finished product. We are now working on updating other areas of our shop.

Mechanical:
This month the mechanical subteam has been busy with many tasks. First we continued cleaning our shop for the upcoming build season. These tasks include the organization of our stock materials which include our wood and aluminium. As well as general shop cleaning and organization of the cave. Another big thing we accomplished this month was the hanging of our carpets. For the longest time our carpets were stored on the ground. This wasn’t the ideal form of storage due to them getting in the way and being a hassle to pick up and move. Our solution to this problem was hanging them conveniently on our newly painted wall. Now the carpets are out of the way and are ready for practice in our 2018 season.     

Electrical:
This month the Electrical subteam worked on making documents to inform our new team members about what our subteam does and how we operate. We also gave short descriptions of the tools and the electrical components used to build our robot.

Software:
This month we added multi-button functionality to our robot, allowing us to perform multiple actions at once. We also began making our baseline test that all robots will go through in order to accurately tune various functions.

Administration:
Admin has been working on collecting student contracts and preparing permission slips for our upcoming competition Battle of the Bay.

Scouting:
The Scouting subteam has been training new members of the team on how to use our scouting system. We sat some of the students down and went through our current scouting sheets as we will most likely use the same scouting system next year. We then sat our students down at our latest off-season competition (RiverRage) and had them scout a few matches there. We will be continuing to train new students on how to scout in the upcoming month.

Sponsorship & Presentation:
Team 238 recently had the opportunity to present for our amazing sponsor Texas Instruments, where we talked about our team and our experience over the past season. We discussed more about our team’s mentors, budgets, and travels.  

We are also preparing for additional sponsor presentations and demos to share with our awesome supporters what they helped us to achieve last season.

Fundraising:
The Fundraising group has been hard at work planning our annual cash calendar fundraiser. We have been contacting different companies to get donations of gift cards for prizes this year. Some of the contributors for the gift cards include Granite State Escape, Panera Bread, Buffalo Wild Wings, Georgios, and more. This is a large fundraiser for the students on our team because it goes towards our student’s travel accounts. The price for the trips we go on will go down for individual students depending on how much they sell in fundraisers. Our goal is to make sure all of our students have to opportunity to attend every single event this season.

Another big fundraiser coming up is our Robotic Art pop-up on December 7th at the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire. This event is sponsored by IEEE and Macy Industries. This will be a pop-up art event to raise awareness for FIRST and 238 in our community as well as raise funds for the students to travel to Detroit. Save the Date for what promises to be a great time!

Outreach:
The team set-up a demo and table with information for our school's open house where we could recruit potential new students to the team and share information about FIRST scholarships.

Marketing:
The marketing team has been working on finalizing team swag for this season including team apparel. We are also working on our banner design for this season, including our sponsor banner for our pit.