Team Question 13

A new season is about to begin. And with new season, comes new recruits and most of all A NEW GAME!!

This year, kick off is on January 8th, so the season hasn't officially begun yet. Therefore, we don't know what the game is yet!

However, Team 2265 and our brother team, 1155, are going to be hosting a small preseason dinner party of sorts. Last year, we were able to have dinner at around the holiday times, but this year, we will be having dinner the week of kick off! Exciting, eh?

Anyways, this weeks question is:

What do you think this game hint means?!

Vivian: Thursday, October 15, 2009

You know you've overdosed on FIRST when..

Because I really don't feel like studying for the AP Psychology test that I have to ace tomorrow and just because I really miss robotics. I stole this from Chief Delphi when I was being a huge nerd five minutes ago.

Cheers from the competition accidentally slip into normal conversation.

Every time you see a helicopter, you think "Dean Kamen is my hero."

You swear you hear people cheering "Blue Alliance" in the middle of lunch.

You come home with a suit of armor made out of buttons from random teams.

Every time you hear a whistle you think about switching to offense.

You watch basketball on T.V. you could swear you saw a green light on the backboard.

You see people in a group wearing shirts of a similar color, you wonder what team they are.

You hear people go, "Aww," you look for the toppled robot.

You type "FIRST" into Google just to see it appear on the top of the list.

You return home from Atlanta and you try and convince your entire group of friends to join FIRST.

90% of the words out of your mouth are inside jokes from the trip to Atlanta.

You wait on the bottom step on a flight of stairs wondering why the escalator isn't working.

You don't make it to school on Monday after the championship because you're too busy catching up on four days worth of missed sleep.

You know everyone should wear safety goggles at all times and refrain from open toed shoes. The big green Safety Captain Button on your shirt you still wear constantly reminds you.

Your suitcase weighs at least 5 pounds heavier on the way home from all those buttons you got for free.

If you're pit crew: You hate anyone who has the nerve to say, "My butt hurts, I've been sitting in the stands all day."

If you're in the stands: You hate anyone who has the nerve to say, "My Legs hurt, I haven't sat down all day."

You can't shut up about robotics.

You're already planning stuff for next year.

You didn't cry because you didn't win, you cried for the team that DID win.

You lost your voice screaming for the other teams.

You were jumping up and down because you got to talk to Woodie Flowers.

You’re starting to get used to sleeping in the aisle ways of buses.

You are going through escalator withdrawal.

You decorated your lamp with buttons.

Your team is going to have at least 20 noobs that you recruited.

You start referring to people from team numbers like, "That kid from 33," and your friends look confused. Then you say, "That kid from the Killer Bees," and they still look confused. Then you say, "He’s a guy from robotics," and a look of dawning recognition comes over their faces so you walk away shaking your head.

You're still wearing the awesome tie dyed sweatband you got from 88 that you haven't taken off except to shower.

Your wrap party wrist band was lovingly cut off so it wouldn't get damaged and you could save it.

You spent today sleeping in more than one class.

You told every single person you talked to a story from Atlanta.

You spent 2 and 1/2 hours on the ride home making plans for the off-season and for next year.

Not seeing Segways on a regular basis seems odd.

*This last one that I made up is especially for Leena: Your mom tries to wake you up from a nap and you ask her when the next match is.

Olivia: 12 September 2009

college is actually related to build season

Hard as it is to believe that I have found a relationship between college applications and build season, I've done it. So consider this my random post every once in a while.

College applications function on a tight schedule. If you screw up, you have a short time to correct the error, but you still have to go forward. With a robot in FRC, you kind of have to either get it right the first time, or keep going even if you do mess up and hope that your robot can at least move? Clearly from this, I'm not on the build team (I confess to having a small fear of power drills from my childhood fear of doctors and dentists) so maybe it isn't that way at all.

But now for the actual goods, I'm happy to announce that another layout change is most likely coming under the onslaught of college applications since Tiffany's is actually phenomenal. So expect me to come around on the blog circuit maybe once a month. I enjoy highlighting people's work a lot, so odds are we'll have either a blog of the month or a team member of the month. Everyone gets an equal share though. I'll even include our mentors! (Jon Cook will most likely take up several months though, because Jon is Jon and he pwns everyone.)

How are college applications going, seniors?

Leena - Sunday, September 27, 2009

Why do we do F.I.R.S.T.?

"Why do we do FIRST? Because the world’s a mess. Read the news. Look around you. We think we have an economic crisis. You know, we got lights. We got ways to get around. You have hospitals. You have schools. I keep hearing everyone saying, 'We have an economic crisis.' 2/3s of the world, 4 billion people are living on less than two dollars a day. Half of them are living on one dollar a day. That’s not a crisis to them because that’s their whole life. You’re the richest people in the world. The world’s a mess. Somebody has to fix it. Do you think the people that are living on a buck a day, that don’t have clean water, that don’t have schools, that don’t have technology, that don’t have an education. Do you think those people can fix it? You have to fix it. It seemed to me that so many kids in this country were just ignoring that opportunity. You have access to education. You have access to technology. It seemed to me that in a culture that’s driven by media and in a culture that we’re free to celebrate whatever we want and then become good at what we celebrate. We got to find a way to start seriously convincing all kids, particularly women and minorities, in this country that they have to start celebrating stuff that matters. We have not just the opportunity, but I personally think that we have an obligation, a moral obligation to help the rest of the world, to lead to a world where the solution to problems isn’t bombing each other. Maybe the rest of the world could learn from us and coopertition could become the way we go forward. So when we started this thing we had a couple of things in mind. You’ve got to make it fun and exciting for kids to see that engineering is every bit as accessible and rewarding and fun as bouncing a ball or any of the other pastimes that have come to dominate our culture. Yes, let us obsess over distractions and nonsense while the world unwinds itself. So you have to make it fun because that’s what we’re competing with. But you have to have content. It has to be meaningful otherwise how am I going to keep getting these giant companies, foundations, government. How are we going to make them keep supporting us unless that we can prove that we’re really making a difference? So why do we do FIRST? I think it’s easy. Because I think the world needs a lot more technology, quickly and the next generation of technologists has to be able to deal with all sorts of issues. Some of which are unimaginable when I was the age of some of these kids. You’ve got to be better at it than we were, you’ve got to be faster and you’ve got to deliver, probably at an earlier age. What is FIRST? Superficially, it might look like it’s primarily a robot competition. No pun intended. The robot is just a vehicle. It’s just a tool. What we hope we’re really building here is serious relationships between serious adults." --Dean Kamen



This is generally what Dean Kamen says in the 2009 kick off, I may be missing a couple of words here and there, but I think I'm pretty close. The speech doesn't end there, you can watch the entire webcast here. The video should be somewhere at the very bottom of that page. The topic is heavy, but I believe that he speaks the absolute truth, we do need to change our generation. We're going to need F.I.R.S.T. to fix it.

Change in Blogs!

Hello there!

This is Miuki, your friendly website elf.

So, it has been decided that individual blogs take too much time and effort which can be placed into the new season. Instead of individual blogs, we will only have a team blog with posts from team members!

The blogs of various team members will be "merged" with this blog. Several new posts will be made to accommodate those postings. In other words, some of the posts above this one will be OLD posts by team members. Of course, the date of when each post was made will be posted.

Cheers!