My School = STUPID

[pauluffel]

I agree with all of those comments about a team not winning based on money, but on the team members. Last year I was on team 832 (rookie all-stars at nats) and we had a rather expensive bot. It was made almost entirely out of Rexroth (tm) extrusion and was built to do about 15 things, but it didn"t do any of them. This year I started my own team and the only way we managed to get enough money to register was that 832 gave us the money they were going to use for nationals this year so that we could compete. We did all of our work with hand tools that team members brought in (with the exception of three pieces of metal we had machined at our mentor"s brother"s machine shop) in a portable classroom. We have one mentor who is an electrical engineer, a parent with an art degree, a sophomore in high school with one year of experience (me), several helpful chaperoning parents, and a bunch of rookie students. We now have one of the best bots at the Peachtree Regional (IMO, we"re the only launcher anyways, HOO-AH!) and we"ve actually been able to help other teams make their bots work.
btw, our accounting totaled $330 this year, we mainly built ours out of the KOP and imagination