Dean’s List is a big honor

The FIRST FTC Dean’s List is a prestigious honor given to students who, as sourced from FTC’s website, are “great examples of student leaders who have led their Teams and communities to increased awareness for FIRST and its mission. These students have also achieved personal technical expertise and accomplishment. It is the intention of FIRST that these individuals will continue on, post-Award, as great leaders, student alumni, and advocates of FIRST.” * 

Teams are allowed to nominate two 10th or 11th graders from their team to be Dean’s List Semi-Finalists.  FIRST Representatives have the task of deciding which students fit the criteria for a Dean’s List Finalist. The winners are announced at the various state regionals around the country. 

Dean’s List Criteria

Criteria for selection of the FIRST Dean’s List include, but are not limited to a student’s:• Demonstrated leadership and commitment to the ideals of FIRST;• Interest in and passion for a long term commitment to FIRST and its ideals;• Overall individual contribution to their team;• Technical expertise and passion;• Entrepreneurship and creativity;• Ability to motivate and lead fellow team members; and• Ability to effectively increase awareness of FIRST in their school and community.

Our Dean’s List Nominee 

ACME nominated our very own Kelly Muir, a long time member of ACME.  Our mentors submitted an application to FIRST at the end of 2017, which included an essay about why he is a qualified candidate.  Later,  he had an interview with FIRST representatives.  Kelly thought the interview went well, but still wasn’t feeling too confident that he would get it. He had to wait to find out how he did until we attended the Northern California Regionals.  

Before awards were given out at Regionals, the Dean’s List Finalists for Northern California were announced.  Kelly Muir was the first name called to the stage. There are about 200 teams in Northern California, which each can nominate two students, so being one of only 4 people picked to represent Northern California as a top FIRST student is a huge, huge honor. Now Kelly is in the running to be named one of the 10 final Dean’s List students, who are announced at the FTC World Championship in April.

ACME Robotics is back for the 2017-2018 season of the FIRST Tech Challenge!

With new members, new mentors, a plan to help organize the team and, of course,  a whole new challenge, ACME Robotics is ready for another year of excitement.

This year ACME acquired several new members for the team including Clara, Sean, Emma, Dominick, Oren and Ben.  Their addition to the team increased the number of members from last year by almost 100%.  They are all wide spread across the three sub-teams with Sean, Ben, Dominick and Oren on the Hardware Team, and Emma and Clara dabbling in both the Software and Business Teams.

We have also gained a few new mentors as well.  In addition to Stephanie, Michael and Mike, we have two new mentors, Josh and Ron, who will both be excellent in helping with Hardware as well as Business.

New members and mentors are not the only addition to the new season.  This year ACME is trying to become more organized, making a schedule for the upcoming build weeks with the help of one of our new mentors, Ron.  We have also tried to become more organized when it comes to executing tasks.

One of the organization things we have done is taking over one of our white boards to create a grid of tasks.  Each member has their own column in which there are five stages of completion; To-do, Design, Build, Test and Done.  We also have three areas for each different sub-team which contain different colors of sticky notes which each correspond to a different task.  For example, yellow sticky notes are for Engineering Notebook write ups.  We all hope that this new practice will be successful.

This year we also took the time to make a schedule for the build.  At the 24-Hour Build (insert link to build post), we made a schedule of the things that needed to be done in the next two months leading up to our first qualifier.  Hopefully, this schedule will help us stay on track with the build and inspire us to work hard when we see we are falling behind.

One of the most important parts, if not more important than the robot itself, is to have a presentable Engineering Notebook to present to the judges at the competition.  The Engineering Notebook’s main purpose is to show the judges what the team has been up to in the weeks leading up to competition.  Kelly decided that he would he would spearhead the project and come up with an effective way to get everyone to write in the Engineering Notebook, as well as producing a format for the Notebook and organizing it accordingly.   He made a Google Sheet on Google Drive that is sectioned according to sub-team and week.  Every team member is subjected to write at least one entry a week.  To further prompt members, there is a reminder in their column on the task board for each write-up that is due.

Everyone on the ACME Robotics team is excited to start the new season.  The new game should prove difficult, of course, but we are all welcoming the challenge.  Relic Recovery will be filled with accomplishments and failure, which will turn into more accomplishments.  We can’t wait to get started!

If you want to check out the new FTC challenge, click on -> Relic Recovery Video