News

Competition Related Decisions

Only about 9 days left in build. It's gone by pretty fast. Well, we have very little time between build and the next big, exciting thing for our team: competition. I expect that everyone on the team will be going to competition. The question is what everyone will be doing. Due to how crazy build season has gotten, our time sheet no longer reflects each team member's dedication accurately. Alex and I will probably be spending some time tomorrow discussing who we think is best fit for each position at competition. After these decisions are made, they will be posted on the website in the current members and competition subteams sections as well as a roster for each subteam as a new story on the homepage. Leaders will probably be decided within the next week or so and then during a meeting all the leaders will be pulled into a meeting with Alex and I to discuss training specifics and times. Thanks for everyone who has made this season possible.

Build Season Update

It is officially 13 days from ship date. Our team has most the robot done, but are yet to connect everything. I(Kate)hear that we're painting some of it today, but being the awards and website person, I am not sure what is going on beyond my jobs. The Chairmans and Woodie Flowers submissions are done as of a few minutes ago and both are pretty strong seeming to me. All of us at team 2906 would like to wish our fellow FRC teams luck for the rest of the season. Things are busy enough here that our next update might take a few days, but we'll try to keep everyone updated.

Kickoff! (Finally)

Yesterday was kickoff. Within this week we will have info on the game posted in the About FIRST section of the website. For now all of our team members need to make sure they get a login and send me that info so we can set it up to share info on the website to only be accessible to team members such as details on our design. We definitely enjoyed riding up to kickoff not only with our whole district as is typical (to include team 2927 and team 3937 as well as ourselves, but also Thunder Tech, team 3213.

The logo!

Dont pay attention to the black and teal stuff around it, its not part of it.

Some Events

So currently we are having meetings every Monday and Tuesdays. this week we will be meeting in Mr. Rohr's room to get checked off on equipment and practice with them, this is required by first. You will see the website change also over a period of time because I(Christian) cannot make up my mind what to make it look like.So keep a check on the events and the countdown so you don't miss a thing.

4 Police Officers

I think almost everyone knows that 4 of our Lakewood police officers got shot today. I think our team needs to do something now to step up and help out our community. A good robotics team shows their community how to behave, well, now we have an oppurtunity to help our community. At our meeting tomorrow, we will be discussing ways to help both the families of the fallen officers and the local police community.

Team Meetings, Thompson Elementary, and Thank You Letters, Oh My!

There is a decent amount of new news. First of all, we are now going to be having meetings on Mondays as well as Tuesdays. Having one meeting a week was proving to not be enough time, so the team decided Mondays are another good day. Mondays will mostly be preseason subteam work to include awards, media, and website. Tuesdays are going to be more geared towards the season and preparations for the season. Tuesday's work will include awards, electronics/programming, fabrication, and media.
Second, this Tuesday, December 1st, our team will not be meeting at Spanaway Lake. Instead, we will be going with the robot to Thompson Elementary School from 3 to 4pm. Their robotics team has been coordinating this with ours for a few weeks. The students at Thompson are really excited to see what we do and drive around our robot. This is an important event to try to attend. If transportation is an issue, please contact Kate and we'll see what we can work out.
Finally, the thank you letters, or letters of appriciation to the teachers of Spanaway Lake High School are going to be distributed the week before we let out for Christmas break. What these letters are is at least one paragraph about what a difference that teacher makes and why you appriciate them. Once you sit down and begin working on them, the words begin to really flow. I expect at least 6 from each student on the team on or before our meeting on December 14th. This is not only to make our teachers feel appriciated, but to change our school one person at a time and to change how we as a team view things.

November 10th Meeting

We will have a meeting tomorrow eventhough there is a teacher's meeting. To aviod the issue of our advisor being at the teacher's meeting, we will be meeting in the commons. Be prepared to have as much of a normal meeting as possible. There is the issue of not having a board to write things on, so if you come paying fairly close attention will be vital. I will post everything covered on the website either tomorrow night or Wednesday just in case. Thanks for everyone's flexibility and cooperation.

Revision

After discussing the matter of changing our name we decided not to for finacial reasons. The process that NASA has would not allow us change our name without losing our grant they gave us. So Botworx will continue to be the name for 2906 Robotics.

School's Website

We are now not only on our school website's activities page, but we are the newest story for the recent news. Actually, the whole story is on our team preparing for the new season. This is a step towards having the school support all the top teams have. A big thanks to our school website's webmaster, Miss Maria Hetland.

New Team Name

At today's meeting we discussed and voted on a new team name and logo. Thank you to Alex for bringing in his name and logo idea of Explorer Robotics, Kate for bringing in her name and logo idea of Sentinel Robotics, and Jamie for brining in his name and logo idea or Bombots. After a series of votes, Jamie's name got chosen, but the decision was made to modify the logo.
For more details on today's meeting, please email Kate. Thanks to everyone who attended.

2010 Season Beginning

The 2009 season came to an end after competition in late March. The 2010 build season does not start until January 9th, but the preseason work has already begun for Spanaway Lake's robotics team. This preseason planning and working makes build season run smoother and increases the chances of winning an award. This is an important phase in the robotics season. If you plan on joining the team, the sooner, the better.