Team 1114 Student: Taylor

[Karthik]

Let me take a moment to introduce to the young man on the right of this photo. That's Taylor, who this past weekend was honoured as a FIRST Dean's List Finalist. Taylor's nomination focused on his efforts within the FIRST community. This year he was responsible for the design, CAD and assembly of Team 1114's shooter/turret. He also did a good chunk of the robot assembly and also led the wiring effort on the robot. Taylor also was very active this off-season, here's a list of some of the things he did.

- Designed an interactive robot that was featured in an exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre for 5 months
- Mentored two FLL teams
- Designed, built and programmed a VEX robot that qualified for VEX World Champs. Also held the world record for the VEX programming skills challenge for two months.
- Led the design of a new robotics curriculum module that has been implemented by the school board in the grade 7/8 design centres
- Formalized the instructions for the Kitbot on Steroids and led the creation of the instructional video.
- Was the project manager for the SimPhone App

Pretty spectacular stuff. For anyone who wants to claim 1114 students don't design or build their robots, you're basically insulting this young man and his peers. It's not cool. Yes there is outside manufacturing on the 1114 robots, but to imply that this means the students didn't work on the robot is patently false. The students on 1114 regularly put in 6-8 hours a day during the week, and 10-14 hours a day on weekends. (The 1114 mentors on the other hand only show up on weekends. We can't keep up with these kids)

This is why myself and other mentors in the community get so worked up when people make unfounded claims about mentor built robots. Each time you make such a claim, you're inadvertently insulting groups of hard working and dedicated kids. Not cool, my friends. Not cool.