Wave Robotics

_{Date added: December 19, 2025}

Wave Robotics is a team of high school students from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, USA, who participate in the annual FIRST Robotics challenge. FIRST combines the excitement of sports with the rigors of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math). With only 6 1/2 weeks to prepare, volunteer professionals mentor students in a variety of sub teams to create a working robot, which then competes regionally and nationally against other teams' robots.

Goals and requirements

Until the Plone site was launched in early 2020, the hosting service did not make it possible to grant different levels of access to users; any user was able to create, edit, and delete all site content. A prime requirement was to allow student team members to create, edit, and publish website content such as news, events, and blog posts. The site also needed to display a shared Google calendar of events.

Visit the site at waverobotics.com.

Development process

The initial implementation used Plone 5.0 and used a theme add-on developed by a Google Summer of Code student in 2016 (https://github.com/collective/plonetheme.future_imperfect, and see https://community.plone.org/t/theme-gallery-for-plone-org-plone-5-themes/2957 for other themes developed that year).

Outcomes

The site has been actively used since early 2020, and the promise of being able to delegate responsibility to student team members to publish their own content safely has been realized. The site was upgraded to Plone 6 and Volto in the fall of 2025 for an improved modern, mobile-friendly look.

Provider: Design Intervention Systems

Contact: kim@designinterventionsystems.com