Business Plan

Mission Statement: 

Our mission is to inspire students to get involved in STEM while gaining valuable skills and experience to empower their careers. Team 1799 will teach students gracious professionalism as they apply business, management, and engineering skills.  

Vision Statement:

Our vision of a successful year is to see our team gain more experience and knowledge about robotics, engineering, business skills, and teamwork. We also want to build a good robot that fits into a niche or support role in the 2024 Crescendo FRC game and get picked to join an alliance and play in the semifinals at the Colorado Regional event. During our off-season, we plan to gain more sponsors and mentors so that we have more resources and knowledge for the years following.

We intend to create a thriving team that maintains a dynamic atmosphere where applying learned skills is enjoyed.  We hope to inspire people by participating in the FRC competition while we strive for continuous improvement through thoughtful reflection of each season.  We do this best when we plan and work to be competitive each season. 

Date Team was Founded: 2005-2006 season

Team And Program Summary: 

FIRST Team 1799 was founded in 2005 by Mr. Bill Schmidt, then an engineering teacher at Dakota Ridge. Today, sponsored by Mr. Christopher Gray,  we continue to aim to embody the ideals of gracious professionalism, as stated in the FIRST Robotics Handbook, in everything we do. FIRST Team 1799 allows members to develop real-world skills in STEM and ancillary fields as we work toward the objective of constructing a functional and effective robot to accomplish the goals of the FIRST Robotics competition. Creating an operational robot is an incredibly difficult task, requiring many people in a variety of fields. This means our members, who come from a variety of backgrounds and skill sets, can develop skills in coding, engineering, business, and project management all while having fun and growing as people. 

Location of Team: 

Location:

Dakota Ridge High School

13399 W Coal Mine Ave, Littleton, CO 80127

Website:

https://sites.google.com/jeffcoschools.us/frc1799

Main Contact:

Chris Gray - Coach - christopher.gray2@jeffco.k12.co.us

Team Impact/Outreach: 

Our team strives to connect and share robotics and engineering knowledge throughout the community by hosting outreach events at surrounding elementary and middle schools, as well as organizing robotics camps during the summer, where elementary schoolers can have their first robotics experience through building small LEGO robots. These efforts aim to cultivate an interest in robotics that will hopefully benefit our team in the future through increased recruitment, community engagement, and fundraising opportunities. 

Relationships And Information Regarding Current Sponsors: 

We currently have long-term relationships with several industry sponsors, namely:

• Comcast NBCUniversal

• Beck Communication

• Discovery Partner

• Maple Consulting

• 10X People

• DL Engineering

• Lockheed Martin

• Wild Ideas Light Company

• Ball Aerospace 

Summary Of Team Growth: 

After many years of consistent performance, the team’s original coach retired in 2016, and the next year only a handful of senior team members kept things going.  Mr. Gray arrived the next fall with the task of pulling together a team of all rookie students. Twelve students helped during build season, but only four fully participated all three days at the 2018 Denver Regional Competition.  The next year we recruited 28 interested students but many had other obligations that kept them from actively participating.  Eight to ten students participated each day of the 2019 Denver Regional Competition. Last year, for the first time, 2022-2023 the team won the Denver Regional Competition and advanced to the World Championship competition held in Houston, Texas. While this represented an exciting milestone for the team, we recognize we need to recruit closer to 25 consistently active members in order to provide the best experience for the students and to ensure a  competitive position in regionals. With more student members, we hope we will also gain more mentors and sponsors, and have enough expertise, resources, and manpower to effectively accomplish our goals. 

What Differentiates Our Team:

The 1799 Wired Up team is a student-led team with a few mentors who teach using a more hands-off approach. This culture highlights and develops our team’s strengths and capabilities, allowing us to create a robot that functions well in specific niche categories for the FIRST Robotics Competition. This approach allows our team to create a robot that presents value to alliances with robots that complement our robot’s functionalities, which, in turn, enables us to work with skilled and capable partners during the competition, increasing the likelihood we will win. 

Future of Robotics: 

With the rise of AI technology, the robotics field stands at the precipice of massive global change. In the coming decades, robots will likely play a much larger role in daily life, gaining much more economic and cultural prominence as they are integrated into a broad range of roles, including manufacturing, service, military, and educational applications. In the high school field of robotics, this presents immense opportunities for our team, as the increased notoriety and prominence of robotics in daily life--in addition to the existing acceleration in the prominence of engineering careers--has prompted people to become more aware and interested in robotics and engineering. This increased awareness could lead to superior recruitment opportunities for the team. Additionally, we will undoubtedly benefit from innovations in robotics technology in the coming years as we get new opportunities to integrate novel software and components into our designs. Coming changes in the robotics field also present challenges to our team, as we will have to learn and adjust to new technologies as they become. However, we are eager to confront these challenges and grow our abilities as a team in our quest to create the best robots possible while also consistently adhering to the ideals of gracious professionalism the team was founded on.