General Team Information

• Team Number: 254
• Regional Selection: Silicon Valley Regional, San Diego Regional
• Team Name: The Cheesy Poofs
• Corporate/University Sponsors: NASA Ames Research Center / BAE Systems / Pacific Coast Metal / Gilbert Spray Coat / Pacific Precision / Lian-Mueller Enterprises / Advanced Welding / All Weld Fabrication and Manufacturing / Good Plastics / Hewlett Packard / Trimberger Family Foundation / Vivid-Hosting / Team 233 & Bellarmine College Preparatory

Long Essay: “Still Doing Our Homework”

Syllabus

Team 254 embodies the mission of FIRST, “To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes.”1 Taking this to heart on and off the field, Team 254 fulfills this mission and completes its homework by making robotics accessible to all. Team 254 would not be where it is today without the help and support of those that made robotics available to us, including countless generous sponsors and helpful teams. In an effort to bring the benefits of robotics to everyone, the members of our team gave over 4,000 hours of their time back to the community this year by mentoring other robotics teams, helping nonprofits and attending community events. With the efforts made this year, our team has completed a total of 8,000 hours of robotics outreach in the last three years. We make robotics more accessible via demonstrations to millions, mentoring and global good works.

Homework Assignment #1: Spreading the Word

Team 254 has founded 25 robotics teams that have in turn founded 11 more robotics teams and continues to work with more than 15 other teams. Our students impact hundreds of middle and elementary school children by spending thousands of hours mentoring their robotics teams. Using Legos as the building blocks of ingenuity, we teach basic engineering and programming along with the skills needed to be successful in school, relationships, project management and life. With these skills as a blueprint, we enable these students to become better engineers and citizens. Parents of the boys and girls that we mentor see the benefit of FLL in their children’s lives and the benefit of FRC in our lives. These parents then decide to send their kids to high schools with FIRST programs and begin to support robotics in their communities. We mentor 17 FLL teams, 8 VEX teams and have founded science clubs in elementary and middle schools that help young people discover the wonders of science and robotics. In the continuation of our legacy of improving accessibility, we seek out opportunities to bring FIRST to new places. We brought FIRST and STEM education to India this year. Students from Team 254 traveled to Mumbai, India to exhibit our robots at Asia’s largest science and technology festival, the Indian Institute of Technology’s Techfest, which had more than 75,000 attendants. We are excited to have officially founded one robotics team in India and are already working on 5 more. We also created an online educational robotics portal for India. These infrastructures help robotics grow and develop in India, while teaching our students real world skills like working across national boundaries to achieve common goals. We look forward to applying this model of FIRST expansion to other countries and regions. We use outreach activities outside robotics to build our team unity and spirit. For instance, we help new students prepare for the crazy competition days by helping to run a Toys-for-Tots Christmas distribution day. We measure ourselves by how much we better those around us. During our annual ship weekend scrimmage we invite all visiting schools to participate in our canned food drive in an effort to inspire other teams to charge their communities. Because of the benefit to both ourselves and the community, outreach has become a permanent part of the legacy and future of Team 254 robotics.

Homework Assignment #2: Making STEM Exciting

The joy of seeing people’s fascination with STEM education validates traveling over 70 events and showing our robots to millions around the world. FIRST has given our students a chance to work with and be recognized by over two hundred technology news sites, such as “Gizmodo”, “Make” and “Engadget”. It has also given us the chance to appear in more traditional media outlets, like CNN or the first FIRST robotics feature appearance in “Sports Illustrated”2. Additionally, we established a close working relationship with industry leaders such as Google, BAE Systems and NASA to promote FIRST. Reaching out beyond industry, into the public, we were featured in events for the San Jose Sharks and Fleet Week San Francisco. These achievements stemmed from a creative solution to FIRST’s goals which we dubbed “Shockwave”. Employing skills learned from the FIRST program such as CAD and machining, Team 254 built “Shockwave”, a promotional robotic T-Shirt Cannon. The T-Shirt Cannon started as a summer project for our team meant to create a robot that promotes FIRST and Bellarmine by showcasing the benefits of a STEM educational program. By displaying a cleanly built machine like “Shockwave” and our competition robots at community events, we raise awareness of the exciting nature of FIRST robotics while simultaneously providing an object of inspiration and aspiration for other FIRST teams. While helping to create a public face for a program that doesn’t receive the widespread attention that it deserves, Team 254 is able to directly benefit those around it. As we reach out into the world, every member of our team takes pride in the differences that we make through FIRST.

Homework Assignment #3: Helping Other Teams

At the heart of FIRST’s competitive spirit is gracious professionalism. True competition reveals the character of everyone involved. We strive to be the best that we can, but we also want to compete against other teams at their bests. To further this goal, our team helps all other teams that ask for assistance. Our programming team created a unique 3D simulator that allows anyone to test and create code on a 3D simulated playing field with a 3D simulated robot. While the simulation may not translate perfectly into the complex situations of real life, it allows teams to test their code immediately, without the risk of damaging valuable hardware and even before the robot is completed. Additionally, it allows rookie teams to practice programming a robot without ever having built one. Team 254 programmers also created a network based scouting program (“Cheesy Scout”) that allows teams to enter and analyze data for any robotics competition3. Cheesy Scout improves the efficiency of all teams that use it because it allows their scouts to store and retrieve all of their scouting data, comments, pictures and videos in one easy to use site. In an effort to strengthen all of the robotics community, we make our software tools available to other teams. We host an open robotics lab at the NASA Ames Research Center that gives teams access to computers, a practice field, tools, and most importantly mentors. We have gained many sponsors over our years as a team, but we also work hard to share resources and thus allow other teams to build the best possible robot. One of our closest teams is the Girl Scouts Team 1868, the “Space Cookies,” who we work with at our lab in NASA Ames. Our founding and mentoring of the Space Cookies helped to eliminate the stigma of the male dominated engineering world that once existed in robotics. We proudly host public scrimmages and invitationals, which not only allows participating teams to build better robots but also to foster healthier relationships between teams. This sense of community encourages team development and learning in parallel. Nothing will contribute more to robotics than an open forum for the proliferation of ideas and shared knowledge. It is our hope that our lab can be a catalyst of ideas in the present and for the future. We know the only way for us to excel is to incorporate gracious professionalism into our demeanor to ensure we have the best leadership possible. With over 80 active members, we are still a close knit team. We can often be found together, during and after school, designing new parts or working though math, physics or other problems. With year round weekly blog posts for all subgroups, daily build updates, biweekly team meetings, and yottabytes of emails, involvement in Team 254 is easy.

Extra Credit

We believe robotics is the future. It is our duty and privilege as members of FIRST to better humankind. In order to achieve this, our goal has always been to make robotics accessible. These actions show our commitment to the creation of science and technology leaders of the future. This 13 year long commitment was recognized in our 2004 induction into the Hall of Fame. We achieve and strive for higher levels of cooperative spirit, creativity and engineering excellence with each passing year. Team 254 has earned 66 FIRST awards from 1999 to 2010. In the last three years, we won five tournaments and earned four Motorola Quality Awards. While our success on the field has been important to our team, it is not what defines us. We view technology heroes as people from all walks of life who spread knowledge to make the world a better place. FIRST provides a chance for people to come together to build a new generation of technology heroes with a focus on making technology accessible to all. In creating something original to meet the challenges of the FRC games we build within ourselves the ability to adapt, influence and improve the world. We will continue to expand our influence in robotics and make new connections to the growing centers of technology as they develop around the world. In the coming years, our team will continue to spread the message of FIRST robotics to new communities, new programs and new generations of technology heroes.

Footnotes

1. Dean Kamen
2. November 2010 Issue of “Sports Illustrated”
3. A special thanks to Kiet Chau from Team 968 for providing the framework for the scouting database.

Prompts

Briefly describe the impact of the FIRST program on team participants with special emphasis on the 2009/2010 year and the preceding two years:

FIRST inspires our team by giving us opportunities to access cutting-edge technology and knowledgeable mentors who guide us through our learning experiences and set down paths to follow.  Thanks to our NASA facility we are able to turn the theoretical aspects of robotics into reality. The 2010 season taught us to apply theories we learned in school such as torque, center of mass and gearing to our robot. This year our 3D code simulator taught our students about physics and software prototyping.

Examples of role model characteristics for other teams to emulate:

Our team membership doubled over the past three years to 81 active students who participate in all facets of the team including graphic design, communication, programming and engineering. This diversity allows us to attract students from all social groups at our school. We do more than just build robots. Strong team leadership and unity allow us to complete 4,000 outreach hours annually, mentoring students and spreading robotics; from down the street to across the world in schools in India.

Describe the impact of the FIRST program on your team and community with special emphasis on the 2009/2010 year and the preceding two years:

FIRST allows us to grow as individuals and as a team of future engineers. FRC gives us the opportunity to acquire many diverse skills including programming, CAD, web design, communication, and text writing/editing. With these diverse skills we built the T-Shirt Cannon that enthralled the public; being featured widely from “Sports Illustrated” to “Gizmodo” to national television. FRC enables us to expand into an active mentoring role, making FLL and VEX Robotics accessible to the community.

Team’s innovative methods to spread the FIRST message:

To spread FIRST’s message, we built a T-Shirt Cannon that has been featured in “Make”, “Hackaday,” and other major worldwide publications. We brought our robot to over 30 demonstrations ranging from televised sports events such as NHL games, to demonstrations at local schools. We present at large conventions ranging from the Google I/O to the IIT Techfest in India. We have literally brought FIRST around the world and to local communities. Shockwave shows millions what FIRST students can do.

Describe the strength of your partnership with special emphasis on the 2009/2010 year and the preceding two years:

We have discovered that the key to a successful FRC team is collaborating and partnering with other teams in order to share design ideas, solve engineering problems and better our teamwork skills.  We share our robotics lab with Team 1868 and let a plethora of other teams use our lab and competition field for testing and troubleshooting.  After build season, we collaborate with local teams like Team 971 and hold practice matches at our lab to stay prepared for upcoming tournaments.

Team’s communication methods and results:

With over 80 active members, successful communication is imperative. We use our team website to ensure that all team members, parents and sponsors are kept up to date. We pride ourselves on an interactive schedule of team events, community outreach opportunities, and weekly blog updates. We post information about our tasks for the week and announce the progress of all aspects of the team. Our goal is to provide information for anyone who is interested in our team or FIRST.

Other matters of interest to the FIRST judges, if any:

The nature of our team is to better the robotics community by looking beyond the game at hand. In addition to Shockwave we are proud to release our 3D simulator and CheesyScout this year. The 3D simulator allows any team to test their code on a virtual robot using real world physics. CheesyScout is an online database that allows teams to enter and view data about other teams at any robotics competition. The goal of these creative projects is to inspire, symbolize, and represent FIRST’s mission.