After participating in FIRST Robotics for sixteen years now, this thread really takes me back. And to the OP, great idea for a thread!
What has been your most meaningful FIRST moment/experience?
Hands down, my most meaningful moment in FIRST would have to be receiving the Woodie Flowers finalist award at the inaugural Ventura Regional in 2015, presented by Dr. Flowers himself. We have so many wonderful mentors on our team that are so deserving of this award, I never expected that I would be our team’s nominee. But as the announcer read the description of the nominee, and I knew more and more they were talking about me, I was almost in disbelief. It was amazing to stand there on the field receiving the award, looking back up at my students in the stands, knowing that they value and appreciate what I do, and that I am able to make a meaningful difference in their lives. What made it all the more special was that during the same year, one of my good friends also received the same award for his team at a different regional. We had met back in high school on different teams, then went to college together, mentored the same team during that time, and then went on to mentor different teams again. For years, I had watched incredible mentors from other teams stand on the field to assist in the presentation of the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award at the regionals each year, and I always looked up to them as they added a new awardee each year. Today, I am honored to stand with these fine individuals as we continue recognizing another mentor each year.
When have you felt most inspired as you’ve participated in the program?
There are so many examples of true inspiration that I have witnessed over the past 16 years, I don’t know that I could pick any single one. It’s inspiring to watch my students win a regional or an offseason event, or to beat a powerhouse team that they never thought they could. It’s inspiring to watch my students walk into the lab each day, and immediately start working towards their goals without any oversight, prompting, or direction. It’s inspiring to watch students build their technical proficiency with complicated things, like the 16-year old girl on our team who absolutely mastered programming, setting up, and running a CNC vertical machining center, something I wasn’t sure a high school student could even learn just 5 years ago when we started into the world of CNC. It’s inspiring to receive sizable grants from the State of California, when working day and night, pulling all kinds of strings to put together our best effort toward a grant application, and recognizing that the department of education values what we’re trying to do here. It’s inspiring for me to learn something new with my students, like when none of us had ever programmed or run a CNC lathe before, but we sat down, opened the manual, spent several days actually assembling the machine itself, then proceeded to make successful parts on it. It’s inspiring to see the magic in students’ eyes when they first physically make something that they have designed, and it turns out like they had intended. And finally, it’s inspiring when year after year, my alumni come back to me and tell me how they feel so far ahead of their peers in college, how they are studying in engineering, excelling in math, completing their degrees, and gaining jobs at aerospace companies and elsewhere. To have such consistently positive results in our alumni really is a true validation of our efforts.
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When did you begin to grok/fall in love with FRC?**
When I realized that a FIRST Robot was much more than just a big RC car, then I was hooked. During my 10th grade year in high school, in the Fall of 2001, when our one and only robot back then was powered on, and the seniors who ran the team looked away and I was able to sneak a little test drive for a few feet through a doorway, I knew this was something I wanted to be a part of. I went on to take a machining class at the local community college where I learned how to operate a metalworking lathe, and actually make parts that were used on the robot. And then several of us, including the seniors, took an AutoCAD class at the local community college, where we learned how to draw parts, and it was new for all of us, and I realized that the seniors were not necessarily smarter than me, because with the team only in its second year, much of this was new for them as well. I was not just a rookie student, because we were all learning together. I remember when we picked the wheels for the robot, and we simply selected the biggest ones the Skyway Wheels catalog offered, because they looked cool. And none of us realized until years later that using large wheels was somewhat of a bad idea for that game, but at the time we didn’t care, because our robot looked cool. I remember spending late nights on the drill press swiss-cheesing gigantic steel Martin sprockets with thick hubs, because there were no aluminum sprockets readily available. But I knew my hours spent on that drill press were making a meaningul difference in the weight of the robot, that would allow it to compete. I remember in my first year working with engineers from JPL who worked on major systems of the Mars Exploration Rovers. They were designing Mars Rovers by day, and FIRST robots with us by night, and played an incredible role in getting Team 696 started back in the earlier years, and it was an amazing experience to work with them. I remember working under the pressure of a real 6-week deadline, and having to buy parts from a very limited selection. I remember one late night, we had to make a decision of what size gears our robot would use, to get them shipped in time to finish the robot. One night about half way through build season, most of the students went home, and I think we had even locked up the lab, and we were walking out to leave as well. But one of us had the Small Parts catalog in our hands. Our engineer mentor stopped us, and we sat down on the steps to the parking lot, and we learned how to navigate and read that catalog, underneath our parking lot lights, and we learned how to calculate a gear ratio, and pick a set of gears that were close to the desired ratio, and select a particular part number to order. And the next week, those gears showed up, and then we had to figure out how to affix them to a shaft, because nothing was hex back then!
In your first year involved with a team, what challenges did you experience personally?What was the most confusing aspect of that first year?
Learning CAD was a bit of a challenge back then. Understanding why we needed CAD was too. At the time, most of our ideas were simple, and we could build them with simple tools. Heck, even having a computer to run CAD software back in 2002 was somewhat questionable. This was back in the Pentium III days! But once I saw one of the seniors design something in CAD, and make the same part on a CNC mill, I knew that learning this software would be useful. I proceded to spend many hours learning Autodesk Inventor Version 5, and ultimately figured out the most basic skills, and ended up putting the software to good use. While the team did not have any CNC equipment at the time, we ultimately grew and graduated to more complex designs, that we were able to have sponsors make for us. Then in 2006, when I was in college, my fascination with machining grew, and I purchased my own small lathe and mill at home. Then not being content with manual operations, I converted the mill to CNC on my own, and it worked. Today, my fascination remains, and I’m learning how to program 4th axis on CNC mills, live tooled Y axis lathes, and use coordinate measuring machines. Back when I started in FIRST, I never would have even dreamed of all this.
It has been a good 16 years, and I’m looking forward to the next 16!