14968
We Are Gracious Professionals
What Does Gracious Professionalism Mean?
Team 14968 challenges its members to become gracious professionals. Each meeting ends with a circle and members share about how we are working to grow into more gracious professionals.
Community Service and Outreach
Welcome Back to School
Members of Team 14968 created a robotics experience for Mount Miguel Students. On Wednesday, August 11, 2021, Mount Miguel students lined up to play a soccer-like game. Students scored and learned about robotics and the power of STEM from team members.
STEAM Night at Mount Miguel
Matador Engineering understands that, as an extension of FIRST, we must inspire youth in our community to rise to STEAM education. Matador Engineering worked to expose middle and elementary school student to robotics by visiting our feeder schools, where we demonstrated our 2021 Robot, and at Mount Miguel when we hosted an Open House, providing tours and information about our Matador Engineering Program. Tours were student designed and student led, as our leadership team stepped up to provide future prospects a glimpse into our Matador Engineering and FIRST programs.
2023 Team Goals
Build a Community
Before the Pandemic, we had a flourishing team of experienced and thoughtful individuals. All in all, we were a well-rounded team on its way up… but it just so happens our great qualities were built by our core of seniors who graduated. I, Ariann Salas, am excited to be the President of the Matador Mechanics as we forge our way back into FTE. I am in charge of building a team and a robot that works. And, I wanted to take charge of building friendships and working relationships that will make our team stronger. I am happy to report, that we faced COVID, broke down, and rebuilt our team and our robot stronger during the course of this season.
Build Skills
Building a robot requires skills and our team is building together for the first time. We had to learn how to use tools and work with each other to build a robot. Working in smaller teams also helped us learn specialized skills that helped us put our robot together. We have come to understand that teaching one another what we have learned so that we may learn how to build a robot that works as well as working together as a team to make it all happen. It has been a lot of fun so far, building, wiring, modifying, and programming our robot we named "Haairuld". We are working to gain enough skills to inspire and train new recruits to our team this spring. We have been reaching out to middle schools in our community to share what we have learned.
Build an FTC Robot
Building an FTC Robot is definitely very complex and detail-oriented due to the numerous constraints at hand. Because of this, our team had to adapt and overcome many obstacles, in order to be concise, precise, and accurate. Our 2021 Robot can play all the aspects of the game, scoring in autonomous, teleop, and end game. It has been our goal to complete the robot by the final competition. Given, the challenges we encountered as a community and team, we met our goal of establishing a team that could handle the challenges of the game. We will continue to build on our lessons from this year, and understand that we can play the game at a higher level if we start with Design Intent. This means that we seek to become better by working smarter next year.