Chairman's Award Essay

This is our Chairman's Award Essay from last year. Remember, this was the essay that made us eligible to win the Rookie All-Star Award, which let us go to Nationals!

Chairman Award Essay

Two companies suggested that we, Castilleja, an all-girls school in Palo Alto California, form a FIRST team. Unfortunately, this suggestion was made in December, quite a late date to think about competing. However, many students were interested and we decided to compete this year. While we were excited, we had no jumpstart to prepare for this competition. Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers financially sponsored the team, with the expectation that we will create a business plan and do our own fundraising next year. IDEO offered to provide technical support and mentoring for our team.

The Beginning

Three Castilleja students went to the official kickoff of FIRST in San Jose, and brought the supplies back to school. That day Castilleja hosted our own kickoff, and we had an amazing turnout of students and adults (over 50 people) excited about the FIRST program. Most girls who were interested in this project joined the team without any prior knowledge about robotics or engineering at all. The teachers and mentors enthusiastically welcomed all girls into the project. Together, we began with a strategy session, discussing what parts of the competition we wanted to attack. The beginning process was extremely stimulating and the level of excitement and energy was over the top.

Next, IDEO hosted an in-depth brainstorming session for our team. With 10 IDEO mentors and about 30 girls, it was definitely a success as we formulated many ideas for a prototype of our robot in 2 hours. All students and mentors split into 4 different groups to come up with ideas for one target area of the robot each: the autonomous period, defense, the arm design, and the gripper for the tetras. Our mentors at IDEO reminded us that all ideas were worth considering and in the end we came up with 150+ ideas that we later voted on. We considered that it was better to keep our ideas simple and realistic for the time period and experience we had.

In order to actually build our robot, the team needed a shop in which to work. Previously, Castilleja had a primitive theater shop with only a radial arm saw. For the FIRST competition, the team cleaned up the shop and added three new key tools: a band saw, a drill press, and a belt sander. Before she could use the tools, each member was “checked out” in a safety workshop class, and finally we could begin building. The team also had some access to the shop at IDEO, but for insurance reasons the girls were not allowed to work with the power tools there, so most of the work had to be done at Castilleja. However, when work was beyond what we could do in our shop our IDEO mentors were more then willing to implement our designs using their machinery. By the end of the first day in the shop, we had managed to create tetras and the five-foot tetra goal.

Our Robot Evolves

After much discussion about the design of the robot, the team decided that we wanted to make a robot that could stack tetras on top of the goals (instead of just under them). However, we had some trouble agreeing on one design to accomplish this. Finally, after tons of Chinese food one late Tuesday night, we came up with a design for a four-wheeled drive rectangular chassis and an arm assembly. Because a four-wheeled base has a tight turn radius, and is easy to control, we thought that it would be the best choice for the task. However, we were concerned that an arm with a tetra could make the robot unbalanced, and we needed to test that. Unfortunately, this was just one small bump in the long road of robot design.

Next the leaders took charge and chose a triangular design for the arm support. The idea was for the arm to swing down to grab tetras and swing back up to hold them and move them around. The team thought this was a simple but effective way to achieve our objective of placing the tetras on top of the goals. The real genius part of the design came from a collaboration between some Castilleja students and one of our IDEO mentors, a plastic “hand” that, once put inside a tetra, self adjusts so that the three slots in the plastic support the three sides of the tetra. It may sound complicated, but really it is simple and very efficient. However, before the team could go ahead and begin the real construction, we had to build a wooden prototype to make sure the idea was really viable.

Our wooden prototype was an excellent visual model. With it, we tried to lift tetras by hand and experiment with its abilities to test the strength of the design. After some testing, we felt the design was sound. At this stage, we began to build our next iteration out of angle iron, this time using the FIRST supplied chassis. In this model, we discovered alignment problems with the support structure for the arm shaft, which led us to change our arm support design in our next iteration from a triangle structure to all right angles, which were easy to construct without welding. Working with our mentors, we decided to use structural aluminum in place of the angle iron, which we found light and easy to work with.

Meeting almost every night for 3 hours or more, the team worked from the ground up, building the chassis, then the arm support, and then the arm. The team worked together smoothly to produce a functioning robot in a few weeks, and two weeks before the ship date we had our first run, successfully stacking tetras on the first try. This event was a giant victory and morale booster for our team.

To the End…

As crunch time approached, we decided to weigh our robot. Sadly, it was over the weight limit. With three days until our scrimmage the team scrambled together and took weight off everywhere we could. Our robot lay in pieces just nights before it would have to be up and running for its first practice experience. Overall, the last few days were very busy but fun as our weeks of hard work led up to this point.

The last full week of the build truly illustrated the hard work and devotion of that this team has shown. Our leader, Jessa Lee, was as calm as ever even though there was so much to do in such a short amount of time. The students and our IDEO mentors came together and worked towards our final products of the robot. In addition to the robot, members of our team had been working on web design and animation.

With some fairly experienced web designers, the website team got off to a fast start, acquiring the domain “www.gatorbotics.com” and designing a visually appealing, informative, and easy to use website. They even managed to get a mentor from Google who came a few times a week to help them with her vast web design experience.

The animation team had a tougher time, for not a single student or mentor had experience with any animation program, let alone 3DS Max. Thankfully, one of the IDEO mentors had a friend who taught 3DS Max for a living, and he agreed to come all the way from San Francisco to teach a brief overview of the program (in 3 hours). At what seemed lightning fast speed, 5 girls struggled to soak in as much knowledge about the program as possible, and over the next few weeks got by with what they had been taught, with a little improvising. They had a creative idea for a story, and each girl modeled a different component of the set until they merged them in order to work on the actual animation.

Overall, our team feels privileged to have had the opportunity to be a part of this competition. As an all girls school, we are especially proud of ourselves for participating and learning about a stereotypically masculine field. These last weeks have gone by so quickly and it is amazing what has been accomplished. We can’t wait until next year when we will have the knowledge we have gathered from this year and the time to plan for the next season. We are psyched and ready for the up coming competition in March!

. . . we have to write a new one for this year, which we are working on.