What's the most interesting thing about your team that's not on the Internet... Yet?
 

in an effort to get to know the teams on newton before emceeing, I wandered around the pits on Wednesday. In order to focus my data gathering (such as it was - I only made it to about half the pits) I decided to come up with one question to ask each team.

What is the most interesting thing about your team that I won't find on the Internet?

I got some great responses, so I wanted to hear what everyone else says, and in the process, add new things to the Internet.

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Jumanji is a banned movie on team bus rides after one fateful late-night ride home from Minnesota where Bonnie Hunt woke one particularly grumpy mentor up by screaming 3+ times.

(That particularly grumpy mentor was me)

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624 has a history of bus breakdowns on the way to St. Louis. (i.e last year we had a shattered window which held us up for quite some time.)

However, one particular year a while ago, the bus broke down halfway along the trip. The team got off and spent several hours at a nearby Walmart collecting the most random toys, products, and as much food as you could possibly fit in a cart. They even gave us some free stuff to help us out while we waited for another bus! Whenever we stop by the WalMart, they still remember us, from what I hear. We thank them for saving us while we were stranded.

Also, we've taken bus, plane, and train, yes, a train to Championships before. Now we just need a ship/cruise...

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Something about 148 that might be of interest is what time the team shows up to the dome in the morning at championship. Too bad that'll never be on the internet. :D All kidding aside, I'll list a few things with the hope that at least one of them is interesting and also can't be found anywhere on the internet:

1. 148 will play Extreme Robowrangler Dodgeball after build meetings every now and then. The team uses the foam balls from 2006's Aim High and a few of the small green balls from VEX's Clean Sweep game (which we call peas). The larger balls aren't much more than a distraction, while the best throwers go for the kill shot with the peas. Extreme rules are introduced for some periods of time, such as landing a headshot on your opponent allowing the knocked out members of your team to reenter the field. Things get pretty intense when balls are flying and people are diving and rolling on the ground to dodge them.
2. The goal every year is to win the world championship. Once the competition season gets started and robots around the world are revealed, the robot modifications and strategy adjustments to respond to these newly revealed robots happen quickly and constantly. One of the ways we go about doing this is by giving ourselves the same scenario every year- how do we beat the Simbots on Einstein? Are we capable of beating them as our robot stands now? If not, what can we change to give ourselves the best chance? (Big thanks to all of our friends on 1114. You set the bar so high, so we have our work cut out for us every year. You make for great motivation. Love you guys.)
3. I'm going to have some fun and pick on JVN a bit. He's not too fond of an excessive use of sensors. His aversion to them at times was almost comical. If a problem could be solved mechanically in a way that wouldn't need a sensor to function properly, that's the way it was done. I can't argue with the results of his design philosophy though. The team has been able to build some amazingly simple but incredibly effective robots under his guidance. On a side note, I love how our robots often seem to contrast with those of our buddies down in League City. The complexity of 118's designs can be astounding, and I enjoy seeing how the two different approaches find success on the field. (The Robonauts are one of the other big motivators for our team. Both of our teams are so competitive, and being able to battle it out at a regional or two with them every year is a great way to test how prepared we are for the championship.)

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Something that comes to mind is that some former college student mentors of 857 are currently on teams 118 and 2826 (2015 world champion and finalist teams).

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Just curious... what did 1741 say?

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LOL. That's awesome to know. I finally had the chance to meet JVN on this trip to St Louis and he is as amazing in person as he seems to be online. I don't think there is a day during build season where we don't use his spreadsheet in our lab.

Also, your team is just incredible to watch work and behaves like true professionals. I am so glad we had the opportunity to work alongside you folks. It was an amazing experience.

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Hello,

Our team actually has an unofficial symbol we can make with our hands to represent our team (not to be confused with a gang sign). It is made with this step-by-step process:

Step 1: Form an L with your left-hand by using your pointer finger and your thumb (like how you would put up a "loser" sign)

Step 2: With your right hand, put up all 5 fingers.

Step 3: Turn your right hand so that your palm faces you, with the fingers pointed to the air.

Step 4: Take you left hand and flip it over so that your pointer finger is facing down (this will form the 7 in 75, so make sure to someone facing you, it looks like a 7).

Step 5: Move you left hand so that, from your perspective, it is to the right of your right hand (ie. crossed over so that your wrists touch).

In the end, you should have made a 7 with the upside down L in your left hand, next to your 5 fingers in your right, making the iconic Team 75 hand gesture (not to be confused with a gang sign). Show your friends, show your enemies, and show the world your newfound skill. Our drive team throws this up after they are announced at every match (if they are not busy taking a selfie), and sometimes our entire team will throw it up in the stands.

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That certain team members were known to eat kitkat bars without breaking them first, like some kind of feral beast. Also that this led to an entire meeting's worth of discussion on the proper way to eat a kitkat.

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Oh no, not the KitKat war. That was just... NO

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Our 2013 robot does not exist anymore even though 2011, 2012 and 2014 robots still do.

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Our diversity. We have had students who lived in refugee camps. Have come from China. Our operator came from Kenya. She has only been in America for a couple of years and is graduating this year at 16. We have a mentor who were born in Germany and another who came from Puerto Rico. We have all sorts of people from all walks of life and backgrounds. It is quite fascinating.

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Only a couple members of TaRDIS have ever watched a single episode of Doctor Who. None of us have watched Season 8 or any of the original doctors because they're not on Netflix yet. We were going to give everyone a crash course on the bus to St. Louis, but no one had DVDs so we decided to watch Star Wars (and Pride & Prejudice... long story) instead. Even I can't name more than 5 or 6 doctors off the top of my head (and that's if you count John Hurt), and I'm the one the team pointed people to when they asked us "Who's the big Doctor Who fan?".

(We picked the name because our school colors are blue and white and it contains the letters T and R for Taylor Robotics).

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For some reason that no buddy knows we have only ever had a single member that was born in 1997.

He was our drive coach and one of the head design students this year.

Oddly enough though I found with less senior students kids in grades 9 and 10 felt significantly more comfortable bringing their designs forward.

This will for sure pay off in the long run for the team.

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For some reason, it has become a tradition for the TechnoKats to eat at Steak 'n Shake on the way home after pretty much any FRC event. This despite the fact that they have never sponsored us in any way, nor have they ever agreed to participate in team fundraising projects.

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291's 2010 robot just up and disappeared one day. We came back from Atlanta, had it for a few weeks and then it was gone. No one has seen it to this day.

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For some reason no one knows, of every female member of our team (sadly, only 5, a number we intend to change), none of them are heterosexual (two asexual, 2 pansexual, and one I don't know but I know they're not straight)

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Our team has a similar tradition with Dairy Queen. It has inspired many jokes.

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At our first district this year, I was injured 4 times during the competition. (just little scratches or bumps here and there. Nothing serious, but definitely noticeable)

At our second event, teammates were trying to guess how many bumps and bruises I would end up with. XD The lowest guess was 5. The highest was 13. I ended up getting 4. :p

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Did you report this to anyone? That's disgusting.

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Blacklisted for life.

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The Zebracorns have a plush Zebracorn head mounted on a piece of plywood on the wall of our lab like a hunting trophy. The story behind it is that the students would drag this awful (and smelly) plush Zebracorn to competition for a couple of years. It would sit in the stands and it had like 200 buttons pinned to it. It was lifeless and kind of sad... and smelly, even after being washed.

One day, while cleaning up our lab I found it and I had had enough along with one of the other mentors... I yelled "AUSTIN! Get your knife and come here." And so the head of Rutherford is now mounted on the wall of our lab. It has some safety glasses on it now too... and maybe a plastic goat after this season. Good stuff.

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Our safety officer a couple years ago somehow created a dictatorship after the power of being safety officer went to his head. I also became drunk with power as the drive coach and ended up being known as the Glorious Advisor in Chief to the Glorious Supreme Dictator for Life of the Imperial High Safety Council of The Botsmiths. To this day, the dynasty continues as we recently added a member to the Imperial High Safety Council: the Glorious Enforcer of Order and Justice... Basically our we accidentally created a parody government that hands out safety citations for various "unsafe" things... Like existing on a planet that could be hit by an asteroid at any minute, or being within far too close proximity to a dangerous supervolcano such as yellowstone.

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I've heard about this one somewhere....

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Our team has a tradition of going to a team dinner after competitions. All the students pile into one of our minivans(I think the members have two or three) and blare Fall Out Boy with the windows down. It a way of us cheering for the rest of our team's competitions.:D

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We have a Spirit Tsar instead of a spirit group, and he leads anything spirit, including our mascot (and he is that also) he looks pretty good too!

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We have like 4 or 5 black belts on our team.

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For some reason during build last year, two members broke into squats during lunch. Spirit leader got in on it and we all ended up doing squats for two minutes.
Our driver did this randomly the first match of our regional that year, and now its more or less tradition to squat when our team is announced. We've even gotten MCs to do it with us. :>

That, and we name all our toolboxes. I think that's pretty normal though.

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Yes, ergo the great KitKat debate.

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Every year for the end of Saturday dinner, we go out and eat as a team. Since the team was started back in 2005, we always pick someone from the team for it to be their "birthday" and we sing Happy Birthday and/or get the restaurant involved too.

Also, our drive team always has to have a thing of orange tic taks with them.

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Our team has a huge presence in the LGBTQ community, one that has built up over several years. As many as 2/5 of our team of 30 identify as something other than heterosexual. It's good to know that we aren't "unique" on that point.

What I think we are unique in is our focus on the Imagery aspect. We have radically changed our theme each year, and we have have a large subteam of students whose primary work is to develop all aspects of the theme. This year we were hippies.

Peace, love and robots! :)

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I believe our team has been to the most different regionals in FRC history.
Other than the San Jose, Vegas and Hawaii regionals, we have never done any other more than once.

**sorry, just read the last part of the post title.

I'm from team 5418; the Sonic Screwdrivers, the other rookie Dr.Who themed team. Very much of our team actually does not watch Dr.Who, and our team name was originally "Mischief Managed", but our school did not approve of the name.

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we dont talk about 2013

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We took an entire wall in the electronics and coding room and laid corkboard for a full risk map. We have played a couple games on it now. We unfortunately have to stop before the start of build season, or we wouldn't be working on the robot. :)

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My team was like that for a while before New England started districts.

Since 2005, we have been to Buckeye, Boilermaker, Wisconsin, Chesapeake Bay, Las Vegas, North Carolina, and Washington DC regionals. The only regionals we had been to more than once was the BAE Systems Granite State Regional and the UTC Regional.

You guys have been able to go to way more regionals than we have, though.

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We like to think ourselves unique in that you have to know how to back a trailer to transport our robot to a match :) (pictured here)

My personal favorite is that myself (the drive coach) and the driver juggle foam potatoes during introductions before each match, and then throw said potatoes into the crowd.

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We romanticize 2013 :D (the year we tend to avoid is our rather cringe-worthy 2011 season)

Also, our 62 students and 12 parent/mentors all fit ourselves in a ~800 sq. ft. shop.

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Similar to this, Falco Tech has made it our goal to stop at a Red Robin after every competition on Saturday night, whether it be competition season or in the off-season. Having endless rootbeer float challenges is only part of the fun. Just in the time when I've been on the team (3 years) I believe that we've been there nearly a dozen times, and probably even more since the team inception in 2010. :D

Re: What's the most interesting thing about your team that's not on the Internet... Y
 

We dont have 2013.

besides the fact our main driver/CEO fired a camera by hooking it up to 12 volts...

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The Granite State Regional in 2013 never happened for 3467. thebluealliance.com lies.

:rolleyes:

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This year we have students from 2 different states, 7 different high schools, and the rest of team are home schooled.

Our rolling tool chest is named Jerry and the wiring team tool box is named Giant Red Tool Box of Doom.

Our lead mechanical mentor doesn't wears pants. In 4 years of mentoring he has worn pants to meetings twice. He normally wears cargo shorts all year in New Hampshire! He is also known for bringing chocolate to meetings and getting in trouble for running in the building.

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Using the word "Virginia" is forbidden.

It has no meaning to us and was never relevant in any manner whatsoever.

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Early discussions of 3946 almost had the official team name as "Having Fun Storming the Castle" (a Princess Bride reference).
This is our fourth year, and we have exactly one four-year veteran. Jonathan was down on the floor of Carson to accept any alliance offers.

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In an attempt to move frisbees from our intake on the floor to our shooter on the top of the robot, we tried to spin them up a lexan helix. our ability to score points was tied to this helix which was a pivotal part of the whole design. And it never worked.

https://scontent-dfw.xx.fbcdn.net/hp...88&oe=55E48873

At the end our our season we stripped the robot apart, took our big helix out to the sidewalk, and curb-stomped the life out of it. The word "helix" is now banned among team 3481.

I later made a board room suggestion meme to illustrate how we should have done things the first time:
https://scontent-dfw.xx.fbcdn.net/hp...8b&oe=55C5F116

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Even if it didn't work, it looks pretty cool... how was it supposed to work, anyway?

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I was just a little freshman at the time, so I wasn't majorly involved in the design, but basically we would extend our intake (I think we call it a power head) which starts vertical via pneumatic cylinders. We run the rollers as we drive over the disks, and they get sucked in through an opening in the front of the frame. Then a series of "insert magic here" rollers push the disks into the bottom opening of the helix where there is a vertical rotating spindle with brushes in the center that spin the disks up the helix which are then deposited in our custom high tech Home Depot bucket hopper.

I'm sure that had we had more time to test and develop it, would have worked well, but our time was very limited that year since our sheet metal sponsor was really slow in getting us our metal. It kind of costs us the season :(

The fancy tall orange and blue structure in the back was supposed to be a lifting mechanism which we also had to throw out for time interests

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So this just happened: https://twitter.com/darrenrovell/sta...095489/photo/1

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Mike Corsetto used to be tall. But then he decided he didn't want to stoop to go under the truss last year, so he shrunk. He decided he liked being short for now (and apparently his fiancee likes it too--who knew???) (And I think he was trying to make me feel better because my son, themccannman, may have surpassed me.) Watch for modifications in the future.... ;)

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There is a Subway next to our build space(its no more that a 20 second walk). We go there so much that the team is on a first name business with the employs, and we have "Subway runs". Witch involve several team members running to Subway for drinks, cookies, subs, or all of the above.

We fund a small portion of the team using script cards for Subway. We have even discussed funding the entire robot (not the whole team) on Subway script cards!!

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Robots and Subways..I'm flashing back to Lije and Daneel running the strips in Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel.

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We constantly argue over which mobile OS is the best. We use that to insult each other when we are poking for fun and/or angry at each other.

My avatar explains my stance on our debates.

I already had an frustrated outburst at competition saying...

"SHUT UP APPLE!" -
which frightened a family next to me when leaving the pits

Yep....Stuff gets weird sometimes on my team.

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we seem to build the best robot for the worst strategy..

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We forgot to name our practice robot this year...

We have a not particularly consistent tradition of naming our robots after shades of blue. (Hooloovoo, Cerulean, Willow, Azure, Mazarine) <-- some of these things are not like the others

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I was going to say that our teacher sponsor on Team 1339 can do a mean rap...
Then I realized that this is about things that aren't on the internet.

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My team has high school teachers, quite a few electrical engineers, a few software engineers and even a machining expert as mentors but no professional mechanical engineers.
We seem to do fine though. :)

We also have some taboo words:
"Water-Game"
"Swerve"
"Carbon Fiber"

The latter two were taken off the list after this year as the entire team came together and helped our mentors overcome their traumatic past :D

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We have a thing for spoons.
(Be prepared for the surprise ice cream social)

___________________________________________
2013- mechanical
2014-mechanical, design, human player
2015- mechanical, design, CAD, driver
2016- ???

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For most of the days of build season, 2169 would listen to an hour of Opera music and an hour or two of "Chicken on a Raft."

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This is the first year that plywood was not part of our robot.

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We always have plywood on our robot... ::safety::

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We actively MAKE SURE there is plywood on our robot! Somewhere. Plywood was a material of choice for much of our early year so we now keep the tradition. Our most reliable robot we ever built was our 2012 robot and was at least 30% plywood by weight. It was so simple that it just worked every match. Being in the pits that year was awesome, queue for match, play match, bring to pit, change battery, break out the chairs and lounge, wait for pit scouts and judges. Good times plywood, good times.

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OK, my other post wasn't really true, that Mike Corsetto is actually Chuck Norris in a poor disguise (trying to hide under his beanie). But what is really true is that our second longest termed mentor Devin Castellucci (RoboChair) in the last 2 years has spent much more time in other rookie teams pits at competitions than our pit. We're afraid that he's lost any allegiance to our team...:eek:

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At least 7 of our original students are still involved with the team as mentors.

And on the lighter side, we call FTC Team 4251 (Cougar Robotics) awkward potato puppies.

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We never put any kind of wood on our robots (bumpers aside). From inception to 11 years later, the robot has been wood free.

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Everyone on our team knows each other we all work as a big family. We establish team building exercises together like going to the movies or attending scotching hot beach clean-ups which leads to sand ball fights and full body sunburns.:p Regardless of how our team ends our year even though we set focus on winning we all are still one big robotics family. :]

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Even though FRC 4607 (CIS) is based out of our local High School (Becker ISD 726); has myself (teacher) and our Assistant Principal as the Head Coaches; the school offers no financial support for our team. Even our MSHSL banners hang from the gym rafters and we have roadsigns that welcome people to Becker.

In fact, the Robotics team actually purchases tools and equipment for our FabLab - upwards of $2000 per year. The last two years we invested in capital purchases that include a new laser for our Middle School and a vinyl printer for the HS Tech Ed Department.

Currently, the Tech Ed Department is working with one of our students to build 25 new PCs for our CAD lab.

So even though the school does not recognize our team as an official sport or activity, our robotics team supports the school.

Oh yeah, of the three flags that we have had - none of them are emblazoned with our official Hex Logo.

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We have a cursed van that hauls the cursed trailer. We have yet to go anywhere without something breaking on either the trailer or van. Last competition, the trailer latch came off (thank god it was bungy-corded closed). We have gotten multiple tickets for not having a brake lights on the trailer (our mentor claims there's one light for every function between the van and trailer). At one competition we put the trailer hitch through the back window of the van.

Oh, and for us 2013 happened, but we have collectively decided to forget about 2014.