AZ East and Year-End Blog

Hey everyone! We apologize for such a late blog post, but 6479 has been up to a lot, and school has gotten us busy. Enclosed below you will find updates about our final competition as well as what immediately after the season looks like for our team.

AZ East Regional

AZTECH Robotics was pleased to host AZ East for the second year in a row. Teams from across the world came, including from the Netherlands, Mexico, and Taiwan. Our team especially enjoyed getting lunch with team 8806 on set-up day. This competition was similar to Ventura County, where we had our pit crew, judge whisperers, drive team, and scouters working hard. We also hosted a Gender Minority in STEM Roundtable and Advocacy Table to help promote the alliances, LGBTQ+ of FIRST, FIRST Ladies, and m.e. FIRST! Our team was also able to advance to the playoffs as the captain of alliance 8. We had so much fun working with BLU CRU and COLTech Robotics.

At the end of the regional we were awarded the Excellence in Engineering Award! Here’s what the announcers had to say:

“ The Excellence in Engineering Award celebrates the team that demonstrates a professional approach to the design process, and whose design is elegant and advantageous on the field of play.

This team shined brightly in their meticulous engineering documentation, optimized coral collection and organized manufacturing schedule. This team demonstrated excellence worthy of victory.

Congratulations Team 6479!”

This was a recognition of our efforts this season and was the result of a combination of hard work across our entire team. Our seniors this year, Jack Hunter, Ben Lewandowski, and Lucas Valenzuela dedicated hours on making our thorough engineering documentation full of engineering drawings, CAD imagery, and insight into our design process. Our entire technical team worked tremendously to aid our  rapid prototyping and iteration which helped us develop a competitive design. Our comprehensive pull plan which we implemented for the first time this year allowed us to stay on task and produce at a  pace never seen before in our team’s history. It was all these factors due to the combined dedication of all members of our team that the judges loved, and we can’t be more proud.

Looking forwards toward the future, we will continue to strive to be a figurehead for engineering excellence as we prepare for next year’s season!

Technical Post-Season

As we wrap up this school year we have a couple of events to look forward to. We will be participating in ARL (Arizona Robotics League) a competition held in the offseason in which teams all across Arizona participate in. Our team will be attending the September and August events and we will be hard at work on readying Teca for these events and developing a brand new additional bot named Junior. On Programming, our wizards are hard at work getting Teca’s vision system at its best, developing autos, and continuing to work on curriculum. On Mechanical, we have begun a design challenge to complete the design of our B-Bot and also prepare our members for the season to come!

This season has been incredibly rewarding for us all and we can’t wait to see what will come next for our team.

Business Post-Season

Our business team has been hard at work over the last couple of weeks. AZTECH Robotics hosted a booth at both the Kyrene Middle School International Fair and Geeks Night Out. We also hosted a Girl Scout STEM Fair that hosted 65 local Girl Scouts. These students got to participate in 8 stations and learn about the engineering design process, how to drive a robot, and what robotics looks like in high school and college. Huge shout-out to Einstein Bagels, South Mountain Community College, the Arizona State University Luminosity Lab, and the Luminosity Lab Illuminate Challenge for their sponsorships and donations! Everyone had a ton of fun at the event, and we hope to do it again next year.

The team has also been working hard on grants, including a grant for LGBTQ students to create an initiative in their local community. If all goes well, you will be able to see the outcome of that grant next season!

AZTECH Robotics will be selling water at graduation, too as a fundraiser. Come say hi if you will be there!

Thank you to everyone who helped support us this season, we could not have done it without the sponsor, school, booster, community, and parent support we received. The blog will be continued through next season, once a month for the offseason and weekly for build season. See you all next year!