Event: Pacific Northwest Regional - Portland, OR
Submitted: 02/18/2005
Your Team Number: 492

Team Name, Corporate / University Sponsors: The International School

Briefly describe the impact of the FIRST program on team participants.
The International School is a small alternative liberal arts high school that does not offer any electives such as shop or computer programming. As a result, students missed these opportunities until the Titan Robotics Club (TRC) was founded in 2000. The TRC allows students to get hands-on experience with mechanical and software engineering, brings members into contact with professional engineering mentors, and shows students that careers in science and technology are achievable and desirable.

Examples of role model characteristics for other teams to emulate. The TRC offers year-round activities for its members. “Hack Sessions” in the summer teach students skills like C programming and Autodesk Inventor. We mentor three Lego League teams each year. This year, one placed 4th at the State Tournament. For the 2005 FRC, we are hosting the Washington State pre-ship scrimmage and have given many materials to other teams in need. We also participate in other competitions - at the Seattle Robotics Society’s Robothon, the TRC’s Mini-Sumo took second place.

Describe the impact of the FIRST program on your team and community. FIRST is the catalyst that started the Titan Robotics Club, and it is still the focus of all our activities. We hold summer “Hack Sessions”, support and mentor Lego League teams to develop members’ skills and abilities so we can be more focused on designing and building the robot during the six-week build period. We use other competitions like the SRS Robothon to promote FIRST and the Club. We work by the ethic of Gracious Professionalism and get students excited about technology. Teams innovative methods to spread the FIRST message. This year we introduced 500 targetted families to FIRST and the TRC with a letter-writing campaign and were encouraged by the phenominal response rate. We have also chartered a “Booster Bus” to travel to the PNW Regional. Seats on the bus are available to students and community members. The high-energy environment will draw in potential mentors and members. Students are more likely to become members, increasing their chances of pursuing science and technology as future careers.

Describe the strength of your partnership. The TRC is partnered with the school community and several local businesses that share our vision of a future where scientists and engineers are celebrated. Microvision, where our engineering mentors work, is the beneficiary of an internship program that has hired TRC alumni. Other local companies receive recognition on our website, t-shirts, and robot for their contributions to the TRC’s mission. Students and mentors learn together through the challenges of the FIRST Robotics Competition. Teams communication methods and results. The TRC uses multiple mailing lists. The TRC-announce list, for example, is for announcements that every member must receive, while TRC-web is for the web team to discuss the website. Club members not interested in the web team do not receive these emails, therefore they are not bothered by them. Similarly, there are also lists for video, the robot, parents, and others. This system has facilitated communications by encouraging discussion and minimizing distractions. Other matters of interest to the FIRST judges, if any. The International School has no high school sports teams; instead students participate in sports through the “normal” high school they would have gone to. The TRC, with its yearly participation in the FIRST Robotics Competition, is becoming the school’s team - a common cause for the students to rally behind and be proud of. We are working to continue to grow in popularity among the student body and show all of the IS students that careers in science and technology are accessible and rewarding. Images: Founded in 2000 as one of the first teams in the Pacific Northwest, The Titan Robotics Club (TRC) has become a leader of the FIRST Robotics movement in the state and in the region. Since its inception, the TRC has pursued and achieved excellence in all of its activities. Despite coming from a small school, the TRC consistently keeps more members actively participating, brings more students to the regionals, competes in a wider variety of competitions, and has more year-round activities than any other FIRST team in Washington State.Based at the International School, a small public alternative high school in the Bellevue School District in Washington State, the Titan Robotics Club provides important opportunities for the school’s 450 middle and high school students. The school’s small size and focused curriculum means that electives like metal shop and programming are not available. The Titan Robotics Club not only provides these opportunities to interested students, but also generates more interest for studying and learning the art and science of engineering through its involvement in exciting robotics competitions like FIRST. The Titan Robotics Club is also a leader in the local FIRST community. After the TRC’s first year, when they competed in the Silicon Valley Regional in San Jose, the TRC was instrumental in helping bring enough teams to Washington State high schools to bring a regional to the Pacific Northwest. Though its active participation in events like the “Tomorrow’s Classroom” exhibit, the Seattle Robotics Society’s “Robothon,” and its willingness to mentor other teams, the TRC has helped make Washington State and the Pacific Northwest a site of proliferation for FIRST. For example, the TRC hosted the state’s first FIRST Lego League (FLL) competition in 2002. This year, the club coached, mentored, and sponsored three FLL teams full of excited middle school students at the state competition. We also work to expand the FLL program by giving community demonstrations of FIRST and FLL robots, and providing student mentors to new teams. On February 26th, for example, the TRC is visiting the Boys’ and Girls’ Club to introduce them to the FLL program. The TRC also takes a leading role in the high school competition. In the past, the TRC has hosted invitational tournaments to help prepare for the FIRST seasons, and this year the TRC is putting on the Washington State pre-ship scrimmage. Always striving for excellence, the TRC is building a field that will be much closer to the official specifications than in years past. Aware of the financial hardships faced by many local teams, the TRC worked to secure a low-cost facility. We were then able to secure a sponsor for the pre-ship event (The Seattle Chapter of the IEEE), so that local teams would not have to pay anything to attend. Though the Titan Robotics Club often brings more members to the competition than most other teams, this was not enough. So this year, the TRC has chartered the “Booster Bus,” a 47-passenger motor coach to transport more students to the competition on Saturday. The goal is to fill the bus with students that will see the competition, and catch the fire that will lead them to take a look at joining the TRC and pursuing a career in science or technology. To better fulfill the mission of FIRST and of the TRC, the Club has a schedule of activities all year that continue to teach engineering skills outside of the six-week build period. Over the Summer, TRC mentors put on a series of “hack sessions”, where students and mentors met to learn new concepts and explore new ideas. In one of the first hack sessions, club alumni and college mentor Bobby Moretti taught about the binary number system, how to add binary numbers, and then about logic gates. Then the group activity was to use logic gates to build an adder for two binary numbers. The interesting part is that Bobby did not know the answer beforehand. He knew that such things existed, but during the hack session, both Bobby and we students learned how to build a binary adder. Through the experience, we learned that even when you don’t know the answer, you can still find the solution by working through the problem. During other hack sessions we were taught how to use Inventor, we built robotic arms using servos, and we even built a mini-sumo robot to compete at Robothon, the Seattle Robotics Society’s annual robotics competition in September. Our entry, Prometheus Jr., took second place in that competition. One nice thing about hack sessions is that outside of the context of the six-week build period, there is a lot more time to focus on fundamental learning. Mentors don’t have to be content with passing along just a cursory understanding; instead they can strive for a complete and full-bodied understanding that is more useful in the long term as the students go on to work on the FIRST robot and into their future careers. For example, during the binary number hack session, Bobby wasn’t content with just one student being able to add two binary numbers. Instead, he made sure that each student could add, and understand why it happened that way, before moving on. It was amazing to watch as each student made the leap to understanding what was really going on after initial bouts with uncertainty and frustration. The Titan Robotics Club has also been expanding its program to include more than just robotics. The club is organized and run like a corporation, with a student CEO, COO (chief operations officer), CFO, and CIO (chief information officer). Also like a corporation, the TRC is working on expanding its operations. The club has always had a website, but since 2003 it has had a dedicated website team. Likewise, the TRC has distinct animation and promostions teams, and is working on starting up video and public relations teams. While more teams means more can get done, it also requires better communications to coordinate their efforts. Thanks to the hard work of the website team, the TRC’s communications infrastructure is now the best it has ever been. Communications is perhaps the most important element of effective teamwork. With excellent communications, even complex projects are feasible; poor communications, on the other hand, make even trivial tasks seem insurmountable. In past years, the TRC has used everything from calling lists and paper calendars to website forums and mailing lists, with varying degrees of success. Each of our previous methods had some fatal flaw: -Pen-and-paper methods require that members check a particular location on a regular basis; they are not conducive to more than one-way communications; and they have long lag times that make changes difficult. -Calling lists are time-consuming to implement and also only work for one-way communication. -Traditional mailing lists send every email gets sent to every subscriber, so that club members mailbox’s overflow with mail they are not interested in. -Web forums, like a paper calendar, require nearly constant checking to get up-to-date information; this only suits a few people well. This year, we have combined the best elements of the web forum and the mailing list to create a system that has the advantages of both. We have multiple GNU Mailman mailing lists, each with its own purpose. There are lists for announcements, the web team, the robot, video production, parents, and more. The mailing lists we use have web archives. Like forums, this allows for members to review information in case they loose an email, or for future members to look up the discussion surrounding past decisions. This brings up another advantage: mailing lists lend themselves well to back-and-forth discussion. Finally, the fact that a mailing list delivers emails directly to a user’s inbox eliminates the need for members to constantly check for updates. The result is an effective communications system that lets us offer a wider range of activities to club members and allows information about changes in plans to be disseminated more quickly and efficiently than ever before. Since the mailing lists have been so helpful to our club this year, we plan to offer the service to other FIRST teams as well. For example, we will offer to host on our mailing list server the PNW-FIRST mailing list, which is currently hosted on YahooGroups and places advertisements in all of the emails. Hosting on our server would eliminate these ads and provide more flexibility for attachments. As 2004 Pacific Northwest Regional Champions and Championship Event division semi-finalists, the TRC has quite a reputation to live up to. Our entry this year is “Tyr,” named after a one-armed Norse god, in the club’s tradition of naming its robots after mythological titans and gods. With more experience than ever before, the strategizing was done in two days, the mechanical design was nailed down after the first week, and the robot was essentially complete by the third week, giving the drivers more time to practice and the coders more time to perfect the autonomous code. A similarly aggressive timeline is a great model for other FIRST teams, because the advantages of having the physical robot to practice with, and the new good ideas that are generated by the robot’s presence far outweigh the decreased design and build time. The TRC will continue to strive for excellence as a club and improve the Pacific Northwest FIRST community by offering guidance and mentorship. We are proud of how far we come in our five years of existence, and we hope other FIRST teams can learn from our missteps and our successes. The unique opportunities provided to students, our year-round activities, and our competitive excellence year after year are turning a small alternative public school into an epicenter of inspriation in sience and technology.