The 2002-2003 robotics season is underway. We are meeting on Wednesdays at 2:30 in room 710 unless otherwise stated.

We are working on fundraising because this program takes a lot of money to run. We had a very successful car wash that raised us some money but we are still far from what we need. If anyone has photos from the carwash email them to me Iceman4809@cox.net.

Tax credits are the easiest way for us to make money and is is free money. Here is the form for the tax donations. Tax Credit Form If anyone has any questions about the tax credits and how they work contact Ms. Pfirman at mpfirman@peoriaud.k12.az.us

Hey! The 2002-2003 school year is just around the corner. That also means is time to start planning for funds and recruiting for our 2002-2003 robotics season.

July 29-31 is school registration and we need people to come in and run the robot around and answer questions. So if you are interested please e-mail me.

Hey! The party's this Saturday at Jason's house after the statewide invitational. If you need information, see Ms. Liewer!

Our presedent for the upcoming year is: Adam Shroyer!
Our V.P. for Communications and Marketing is: Greg Lopienski!

Congratulations everyone on a wonderful year!

I'm still waiting for Nationals pics. so send 'em in!

The future moderator for the web page is James Go. as the transfer cpmmences, expect things to be a bit hairy, but maybe even barely noticeable.

See you all at the party!

Hey! We're back! Sorry I didn't update immediately upon our arrival back in Phoenix. Well here's our news!

WE PLACED 17TH IN OUR DIVISION!

That's 17th out of 71 teams in our division at nationals! We are extremely proud!

As soon as the pictures come flooding in, I will post them. There is a meeting this Thursday at 4:30! be there!

As I write this, in the pits, we have one more match today. so far we've only lost one match. the last match we played in, we won and scored 114 points, bumping us into 15th place! I'm hoping this is foreshadowing for future matches (many wins!). By the way, our average score is about 84 points, which is a HUGE improvement over what we ot at regionals.

I hope you all are staying with us via the webcast or via this page. Words cannot express the extreme joy and exhileration we are feeling right now!

Today is a good (understatement) day.

Well, we're here... The first day was rather neventful. Just a few minor problems,but everythings working fine now. Don't forget to check the webcasts! We're in Curie Division. Sorry for the short message. we're about to leave for the Seeding Rounds...

I put some pictures up. Just three from the regional, unless somebody else has some others to send in... I have a scanner, so just let me borrow them for a night of something... Well, I have to wait till Nationals is over until I get my own pictures developed, because I kept leaving my unfinished disposable cameras in the hotel room. I just have to finish them all off.

ANYWAYS, there's a meeting on Tuesday at 4:30. Engineers and robotics students (even the ones not going to Nationals) are encouraged to come.

Once again, I hope to be able to update the web page from Nationals. Check out the webcasts, or watch NASA TV!

http://www.usfirst.org/robotics/webcasts.htm

We will be in the CURIE (blue) division, so if you are watching the webcasts, look there. NASA TV will only broadcast what goes on on the main stage.

I'm sorry for the lack of pictures. I know I kinda lead you guys on. I'm still waiting for some people to drop them by me. Hopefully tomorrow (there I go again) I will have some pictures... but don't expect them to be up here right away.

You may notice a few changes I made today. Like: no Trip-O-Meter. We made enough money to take 9 students and a few adult sponsors/engineers, and it is now unnecessary. This page should take less time to load because I deleted some old, old news.

If any of you want to program this page next year (cuz I'm graduating), drop me a line at Skanker@www.com. It's real easy, and I can teach ya, if you don't know how to do html already (I use dreamweaver--makes it REALLY easy).

Just a reminder: meeting tomorrow (WEDNESDAY) after school (2:30), and packing meeting on TUESDAY next week before the trip. ALL of you guys are expected to be at Wednesday's meeting (except engineers).

Today was great. We started off a little slow (lost the first match), but we started turning around with a win in the next match.

To top it all off, we were chosen to compete in the finals! Unfortunately, the first round (quarterfinals) we were beaten by the number one alliance (who was undefeated in the finals), so we were eliminated. Nevertheless, we were honored and extremely excited to be in the finals.

We are about to have our team dinner and then go hit the Universal Studios City Walk. Good times...

On to NATIONALS!

Highs: we worked together as a team very well. Many of our newbies (please forgive the terminology) go some field time. Our robot only broke during a match once. Our robot was usually the juggernaut robot in the matches. We successfully dumped balls into goals in almost every match. Our team was extremely spirited and had a generally great time. The team party was pretty cool. Just about everyone in the club busted their moves on the dance floor. It was pretty fun... oh yeah, and Dean Kamen personally watched our Chairman's Award video. Cool eh?

Lows: Unfortunately, we got nailed with some bad circumstances. Usually we were paired with an inexperienced team and our strategy just didn't work, although we almost always scored into the thirties with no multiplier(which is pretty good). Hopefully tomorrow we will do better.

I guess that's about it. We've been having a blast, except for the disappointment we have all felt at not ranking as high as we know our robot should have.

Sorry again about no pictures, I didn't have time to load them up, and I didn't have access to the digital camera anyway.

Today we arrived with a few problems... Mainly that our lift was broken and our drive was faulty. We are very pleased to say that everything works for tomorrow.

We anticipate a very good day for us tomorrow. Everything is working, and we appear to have an edge over most of the other teams because of our ball lifting ability.

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures from today, but tomorrow, I hope to upload a few new ones. Don't forget to check out the webcast!

Well, as the title says, we're here in LA Not much else to say I guess... Check out the webcasts and stuff. Links are below!

It was brought up today at the meeting how you all at home can watch the competition. Unfortunately, NASA is going to show the Silicon Valley regional instead of ours because that regional is bigger and had been around longer. ANYWAYS, you can check out the LA (Southern Cali) here:

http://explorer.arc.nasa.gov:554/ramgen/broadcast/ARC1/encoder/firstjpl.rm

That link won't work until Friday and Saturday (Apr. 5-6), and you'll need RealPlayer to watch. You can get that here:

Get Realplayer 8 Basic

Hope that helps! See you there!

For those of you that have it, watch NASA TV tomorrow from 11 AM to 3 PM (AZ time). The first regional competition is on!

Why should you watch it?

1) To get a feel for the actual competition
2) To see other robots in action
3) to gather information about scoring and rulings (average score, etc.)
4) just for fun!

If you can, record it on VHS for us

How can you watch it?

1) NASA TV - COX Cable owners: channel 113 (on mine),
Satellite owners:GE-2 Transponder 9
2) Webcast, yes webcast. Check this out: http://www.usfirst.org/robotics/webcasts.htm

Hey kiddies! We know who's goin' to regionals and nationals (you should by now). Yippee! We are only taking nine students, as opposed to the hoped for eleven, but that beats last year's four. When it came down to the line, we didn't have the money to take eleven kids, so we had to cut it down. I hope nobody was too disappointed.

Thanks to all y'all for helping raise money and support us! We are still gladly taking donations and doing fundraising, so keep it up guys!

Wow, what an insane weekend! We spent around 32 hours this weekend working on the robot. I'm proud to say we're shipping it with only a few small glitches! Just an error with the drive control system to work out, and some small lift repairs to do.

We only need $1200 now to cover our costs to regionals and nationals. Keep those tax-credits and donations rolling in!

Don't forget to come to the meeting on Thursday at 4:30, and come with those nationals applications!

Here's a picture of our robot at the practice on Saturday:

I have rearranged the picture section a bit. This should cut down load times for the picture page (I'm sure they were getting rather large for the dialup users).

Yeah, I know it's a few days late (since Wednesday), but we jury-rigged the robot on Wednesday, and it moved for the first time!

We are continuing to progress towards our goal of 10 thousand dollars (due in a couple weeks). Keep checking the trip-o-meter! It looks like we're going to nationals folks, it's just a question of how many students are going!

Don't forget to come to our expo on Monday! And don't forget about our trip to Highland HS on Saturday!