What are your victories?

[Clem1640]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

Our team reached most of the goals we set out this year and made tremendous improvements across the board. But to me our biggest victory was the most unexpected. We set out to work more cooperatively with other teams in all aspects, stepping it up each competition. In the end, we helped at least two rookie teams become highly competitive in their division, and we discovered how rewarding the effort was.

Really tough to beat these. Great work!

[YAK'ker]

wow - I really needed to read this tonight. I'm exhausted from our districts, and feeling very discouraged.

Being from a poor, small, rural high school that has little to no access to engineering professionals who are willing to help mentor our team is hard. We go to competition and marvel at the beautiful robots that were designed by professionals (some actually built by students.) We see chairman's award videos that were either professionally produced or produced with equipment that we could only dream of using. We try our best but always the brass ring is outside our reach, or so it seems.

But the bigger successes are intrinsic to our team:
STUDENTS design, build and program the robots with very little adult help
STUDENTS write all the grants we need for our small ($10,000) team budget
During most years, we have 10% of our student body on the team.
We have had a 100% HS grad rate on our team since we started in 2007.
We have had 100% of our team either go on to college or join the military since they graduated, some to MIT, CalPoly, Stanford, etc.
We do things not because we think it would be good for the Chairman's Award, but because they fit our community needs and they are fun. We have recycled over 60 tons in the past 4 years, about 1/3 of it e-waste. We host a Nerdapalooza game night and help with a Sciencepalooza and have a blast, while helping make STEM more fun.

There's lots more....but I guess I just needed to get some of that off my chest for now. Also feeling discouraged because our school admin is discontinuing our woodshop and drafting programs, which have provided a home for our team. We are trying to find options and just hoping to survive. It's hard to go to competitions and see so many teams that are so flush with money and mentors. Just have to keep seeing that the brass ring isn't as important as the successes that being on the team gives our students.

[mklinker]

1. Held a summer robotics camp that served 60 students AND raised funds for our 2015 season.
2. Started 5 elementary robotics teams and 5 middle school robotics teams. Both age levels were highly competitive!
3. Doubled the size of our FRC team.
4. Designed and manufactured our own drive base for the first time in team history.
5. Completed a very professional looking sound robot two weeks prior to stop build day.
6. Created our first Business plan. We will use as a foundation for work to do in upcoming seasons.
7. Received the judges award at our first district contest because of the above items.....The student representatives knocked it out of the park when the judges visited!
8. Recovered from a dreadful first day in Kokomo (robot lost connections in three of our first four matches) to make it to the elimination rounds.
9. Increased team sponsorship including an anodizing sponsor.
10. Learned much and had GREAT FUN in the process!

[YAK'ker]

Just a bit curious here....all the FLL teams we've helped with or others have started in our rural community have disbanded, after only a couple of years, because there's no mentor support.

It seems a bit of a waste of energy for us to try to set up workshops to attract kids to FLL, when we have no adults to lead them.

We concentrate on building good relationships with our sponsors, doing lots of community service projects that are relative to STEM, and just hoping that we can get more parents hooked on participating.

I'd like to see a thread on how we can get more industries to contribute mentor time....our local industries give us money, but they keep their engineers on a rotating swing schedule, which makes it hard to get them to volunteer, even when their kids are on our team.

[Dan Petrovic]

We have been awarded the Gracious Professionalism award three times since 2008, due to helping teams in distress.

2008, Wisconsin Regional - This was my senior year and our robot, while not great, was solid. It never had any failures, so during our second competition of the year, our pit crew spent more time working with and helping other teams with their robots than our own. In the end, we had helped 7 teams get robots onto the field.

2010, BAE Systems Granite State Regional - I was not with the team at the time, but for the past few years, we had often packed our pit with everything imaginable for the strict purpose of loaning parts out to other teams. This has been our culture for the past couple of years. If any team needed anything we would be the first to provide it.

2015, NE Pioneer Valley District Event - We have a lot of history with one of FIRST's Hall of Fame teams - Team 151, the Tough Techs, from Nashua, NH. Back in 2001, 166 lost their sponsorship and approached 151's primary sponsor, BAE Systems, to ask for support. Not only did BAE provide sponsorship, they also invited us into their facilities to work. This meant that 151 would now be sharing their long-time work space with another team. Instead of being resentful of the situation, they welcomed 166 with open arms and helped breathe new life into 166. Neither team works out BAE Systems anymore, but it was an important step in reviving our team.

We returned the favor this past year as, long story short, 151 completely lost access to their school's well-equipped machine shop and were now working out of a space that, to my understanding, was a teacher's office. Given our history with them, we invited them to our work space at Merrimack High School and offered to machine parts for them. We also worked with their administration to help them regain access to their machine shop.

We didn't help 151 in hopes of winning a trophy. We helped them because they had done the same for us in the past and would absolutely do the same for us in the future. In fact, we gave one of our trophies to them because they earned it as much as we did. It was a trophy they had deserved and had missed since 2001.

Our biggest victories though, come every night when an alumni mentor arrives to work with the team. A large number of our mentors at this point are Chop Shop alumni and that speaks volumes to what FIRST is about.3

One last thing: Despite all of the snow that this region experienced, we were able to get a fully-functional robot with a completely working autonomous mode before the end of build season. I don't think our team has ever had a working autonomous heading into our first week of competition.

[Mike Norton]

Victories are keeping the FRC program running at BVT for 21 years. Making sure the administrators and school committees are happy with the program.

Running a FLL tournament since year 2000. Helping out the 13 towns middle schools that feed into our regional high school. (64 teams compete each year.)

Seeing over 1500 students in those years become better thinkers and problem solvers.

Lastly building all those robot in the 6 week time frame and live to tell about it. Thanks to being in a Vocational High school were all the work gets done during the day.

[JamesCH95]

My personal objective is for my team to make a robot that is weird but extremely effective and has one feature that virtually no other robot has.

As a team we strive for sustainable improvement through the season and year-to-year, even if it's only a small improvement.

It is sometimes tough to see the top-tier teams and their robots and how incredible they are only realize that your team may never get to that point no matter how hard you work. This is where developing satisfaction from within is key, not only in FIRST but also in real life. I really appreciate the sentiment of this thread as it is something I have also struggled with as a student and as a mentor.

[GreyingJay]

Well, I'm new, new to FRC, and new to mentoring a team. Surviving my first build season (yikes!) and first regional competition counts as a victory, I think!

What do I count as a victory this year? (At the risk of tooting my own horn) Helping a student understand what FIRST is really about. Teaching him that it's not about our robot performance or how big, little, or "shiny" each individual's contributions were to it, but that it's about teamwork, cooperation, and above all, learning. Learning about engineering, communication, working with different personalities. Learning and discovering your own skills and passions and aspirations.

I treat it as an incredible privilege to be in a position to teach this stuff to students, and to learn so much in the process!

"I'm not here to build a robot. I'm here to build students."

[Wawa]

For the first time in the five years that this team has existed, we
1. bagged a functional robot!
2. were on the radar to be picked for a few alliances!!! (doesn't matter that we didn't get picked, we were all excited anyway)
3. were the ONLY team to have a mascot wave the flag before our matches!
4. were in the running for awards!!! (we didn't win any, but it was SO cool to know that we might have)
5. had an autonomous program!

We may not have won any trophies or medals, but we are still victorious.

[nixiebunny]

My victory? Working with my wife and brother (all of us mentors) to keep our team's one over-achieving but under-socialized student away from the drive team yesterday afternoon, so that they could calmly use the marvelous robot he designed to win a regional competition.

Sometimes, it's all about the people.

[MentalPhantom63]

This year was amazing for our team
1. Build a working robot that focused on one element of the game and do it well
2. Finish build with one day to spare (Which we lost due to snow)
3. Finish in the top 25 at BOTH regionals we competed in
4. Be picked to a Playoff Alliance in both regionals (last time we made the playoffs was in 2012 and that was as the 24th pick)
5. Win an award at both regionals (Excellence in Engineering at Palmetto and Industrial Design at Virginia)

This was a record breaking year for us and I hope my team does even better in years to come sadly it senior year so I hope to help them out in any way I can while in college

[Navid Shafa]

Originally Posted by nixiebunny

My victory? Working with my wife and brother (all of us mentors) to keep our team's one over-achieving but under-socialized student away from the drive team yesterday afternoon, so that they could calmly use the marvelous robot he designed to win a regional competition.

Sometimes, it's all about the people.

These are the people that this program truly hits the ball home for. Seeing kids come into this program, incapable of interacting with others in a social setting (often extremely gifted), given the opportunity to learn, grow and mature in a safe and friendly environment...

Working with some of these kids has definitely been one of my biggest victories too.

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by Navid Shafa

These are the people that this program truly hits the ball home for. Seeing kids come into this program, incapable of interacting with others in a social setting (often extremely gifted), given the opportunity to learn, grow and mature in a safe and friendly environment...

Working with some of these kids has definitely been one of my biggest victories too.

I really wish that FIRST and FRC were around when I was in high school (well, they technically were, in 1992-1996, but certainly not in my region). I was exactly that kid. Intellectually gifted, socially stunted. I actually dreamed of building a robot - I had notebooks full of design sketches and schematics. In grade 9 I went to the school library, borrowed a book about microprocessor architectures, and proceeded to sketch a schematic of a basic Z80-based computer at the IC level (a gazillion parallel wires for the address and data buses, etc.) I wanted to build it, but my biggest setback was the high cost of an EEPROM programmer.

That's the kind of nerd I was. I was also a tall and uncoordinated teenager. People saw my height and assumed I would be good at basketball, but quickly learned otherwise. I was first pick... once.

Back then, kids like me (into geekery, not varsity sports) were beaten up in the locker room. Today, it's "You like robots? You should totally join this FRC team!". I think that is a huge victory.

[Sperkowsky]

Our team went to the nyc regional last year with a blank drivetrain. We were next to the andymark team and makeshift robotics. two teams that had robots fit to be showpieces. Some could say it was embarresing but we focused on the good. We had a drive train that could focus on defence. I ended that regional with a drive (pun intended) to not fail again. That summer I built our teams website, designed a new banner, made a logo, and made a plan to make the 2015 year better. I came back to robotics on the first (also pun intended) day of school and realized this year would be different. Although we werent able to finsih everything we wanted to. We ended the season with a semi working robot, 5 new sponsors(we had no sponsors in the beginning of the year), and our first robot cart. Some teams would take that all for granted and say they are small things; some may even say they are bad things.

But.....

I can confidently say those are our victories.

Now lets see if we can get some awards this weekend

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

We ended the season with a semi working robot, 5 new sponsors(we had no sponsors in the beginning of the year), and our first robot cart. Some teams would take that all for granted and say they are small things; some may even say they are bad things.

But.....

I can confidently say those are our victories.

Those are absolutely victories! Sponsors for sure is huge! Not only for financial reasons but it will up everyone's game a bit on your team, knowing there are people watching that you want to impress. It also lends a level of professionalism and pride (and somehow looks more "official") when your robot, banner, T-shirts, etc. have sponsor logos all over them.

Congratulations and good luck!