We have seen lots of updates from FIRST through blog posts, vendors have been releasing new products, and lots of other great stuff has happened since the end of Champs til now. Almost too many to keep track of.
So in the spirit of the holiday, what is your team most thankful for as we head into Reefscape?
If I had to pick one thing our team is most thankful for, it would be the change to allow preordering of some game pieces. We missed every opportunity last season to get additional notes. We tried FIRST Choice (just wasn’t lucky enough), had alerts set at Andymark, but by the time the school purchasing would go to place the order they’d be gone. No more using 1 game piece for an entire season of development and practice.
Lotta robotics stressors have managed to resolve themselves (more room in the budget with a grant for example)
I’m usually starting to get excaited about a season mid December, I am now excited because we have things in place to rock and roll wayyyyy ahead of time this year. I’ll probably start getting excited about what the game has to offer mid December still.
This was a great week for (me and) the team. We got added off the waitlist for a must-have event. But for the team in general, my move to CTE classes is finally materializing. We’ve struggled for the last decade to make our seasons work. Now we have:
a dedicated shop room that is not shared with anyone else
registration and event payments in the school district CTE budget
open purchase orders for major FRC suppliers
It almost doesn’t feel real, but we have a huge level of support from our school and district. And for that, I am very thankful.
Awesome students from a number of teams went to multiple school board meetings, plus some outside lobbying, to advocate for return of funding to robotics teams (as well as other programs). The school district said they heard us, and are returning 1.2 million in funding this year, and 1.8 million next year.
It’s been super cool seeing what 321 has been able to accomplish, and I’m glad I stumbled on to the team a few years ago.
This is something that actually happened a bit over a year ago, but my Thankfulness is multi-year kinda magnitude. Our team has pretty much everything we need, but we lacked a key that could get us into places. We had a tech ed teacher affiliated with the team who had one, but he “moved on”. So we asked…can we have a key? Well OK. How 'bout we put one in a lock box for ya? As it turns out this opened up many doors, literally and figuratively. We found odd storage spaces that had been the subject of whispered legend! Every time I tap in the number sequence on the lock box and take out the shiny metal key I murmur under my breath…“My…Precious…”
We’re thankful for the new space we’ve been given to use.
For the entire existence of the team we had been using a classroom that was a tech ed class during the day. Let’s just call the experience sub-optimal and leave it at that.
In late October we were given the space that was the auto shop from 1975 to 2000, and then junk storage from then until now. It’s a 46’ X 36’ 3-bay garage that’s all ours. Now we just need to have it ready for kick-off.
Ah yes, the four ingredients of FRC viability. Students, Mentors, funding…and Administrative Tolerance. Enthusiastic Support is better but Tolerance will suffice…
We are super thankful for our amazing regional director who is the only reason we were able to continue this season. We are also thankful for our new mentors and the amazing new workshop we are now working out of.
