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Originally Posted by Steve W
Your holier than thou attitude has made me really upset. Trying to justify what you either do or want to do.
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Steve, please do not be upset with me nor Team 118. Our team has never made, nor do we wish to make, parts outside of the 6 week period. As a matter of fact, it is part of our philosophy not to even procure non-common parts until kickoff. Yes, we do stock standard aluminum, sprockets, chain, and such but we feel that it is part of the students' learning process to decide exactly what you need and procure the parts. UPS Blue loves us
Honestly, we really don't have much time in the off-season to think about the next year's robot. We spend two weeks learning the FLL competition and then mentor teams; we mentored over 15 teams this year. We then host, in early December, one of the largest FLL State Tournaments. Also in the fall, we help with the BEST (
www.BESTinc.org) kickoff, practice day, and the competition along with mentoring a few middle school teams. We also design and implement the EARLY (
www.EARLYrobotics.org) Fall Challenge and host the Houston EARLY Fall Tournament. And in the spring, we do engineering outreach during the build period as well as outside of it. We help with the Texas Botball (
www.Botball.org) kickoff workshop in January and host the Texas Botball Tournament in March. Also during the build period, we design and implement the EARLY Spring Challenge and then host the Houston EARLY Spring Tournament soon after the FRC Championships. Our mentors are also very active on the FRC Lone Star Regional Committee and the Houston Robotics Committee, which assisted over 10 FRC teams this year with funding.
So, please let me assure you that gracious professionalism is alive and well on team 118, the Robonauts. Below are some comments that I received just last week from an FLL Coach:
"You and all the volunteers (mostly Robonauts) did a wonderful job. This was an amazing day and my son is still beaming. ... They (Robonauts) have no way of knowing the influence they have been on my son. He has followed this team for 3 years. He even has the Robonaut sign one of the team members gave him 2 years ago hanging in his room. This team influenced him to get into the First Lego League. He has wanted to compete since he was 9. At that time, Battlebots was his favorite show and all he wanted to do was build something big and destructive. One of the Robonauts talked to him about the importance of being Constructive in Robot design. He has not watched the BattleBots shows since. The Robonauts team is certainly made up of a group of young adults that make their families, schools, and communities proud. I know that these teams do not get the recognition that the sports team do, but they do deserve it. Please pass on to the team that they are doing things greater than they could even imagine. They are being positive roll models, and that is hard to find these days."
I'll call it quits on a positive note and get onto authoring another YMTC,
Lucien