Team Rembrandts

My name is Sterre, I’m 18 years old and I study mechatronics. When I was in my third year of high school, I joined team Rembrandts. I decided to join this robotics team because I wanted to do more with technique outside of school and meet new people.

Team Rembrandts is a large group of people, mostly students, that builds a robot every year to participate in a big tournament. This tournament is organised by a community called FIRST. During this tournament, hundreds of robotics teams compete against each other to eventually become the world champion of the season! To win the match, each team receives the rules of the game six weeks in advance and designs a robot, after the design is final, the building season begins! This years building season was a lot of fun for me because I was able to contribute a lot and help with almost everything. I contributed by designing things for the robot, helped with electrical and programmed. the thing that I worked on the most is making sure the robot is able to climb because in the end, when the time is up, the robot must climb to the top for extra credit.

After the building season was done, we flew with a large group to Florida, USA to participate at the regionals. We participated in two regionals, we won the first one and made it till the semi-finals at the second one. During the regionals I joined the pit crew, here I worked with my team mates to put the robot together and fix things between matches if needed. One of my highlights is beating my teammate at switching tires ;p

Because we won the first time, we were able to participate at Worlds where the best 450 teams of the world come together to fight for the World Title. Sadly, we didn’t win the world title… but we still made it to the quarter finals!

Even though our main focus was the matches, we also did some other fun activities. We went on an airboat and watched the alligators, we paintballed, and of course explored Orlando. We even went to NASA to watch a rocket launch!

Going to the US with such a large group of friends was a special experience. You get to know different sides of each other because you rely on each other to have each other’s backs. Teammates always spoke about Team Rembrandts being one big family, but this year I found out that this is honestly true.