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Contributors:
Austin Benedicto
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Introduction
Introduction
This article describes the team structure of 12737. Our team thrives on collaboration, leadership, and a strong support system. Whether you're a new member, a returning veteran, or a mentor, understanding how our team is organized helps everyone contribute more effectively.
This page outlines the key roles within our team—from captains and mentors to student leaders—and how each part of the structure works together to help us grow, learn, and compete at our best.
Section 1 | Team Mission
Section 1 | Team Mission
We aim to create an environment where every team member can explore their interests, develop technical and leadership skills, and contribute meaningfully to our shared goals. Whether it's building a robot, writing code, designing in CAD, or presenting to judges, we believe that everyone has something valuable to offer.
We are committed to:
Fostering a culture of curiosity and creativity
Supporting each other through mentorship and teamwork
Pushing ourselves to improve through every challenge
Representing the values of FIRST both on and off the field
Through hard work, innovation, and collaboration, we strive to make each season a meaningful experience for every member of our team.
Section 2 | Work Of Life
Section 2 | Work Of Life
The Work of Life Role (WoL) is broken down into 2 main parts the FTC open alliance writer and the notebook writer. They will both be broken down in this section
Notebook Writer: The Second FTC Wol is the Notebook Writer. Their main goal is to be the lead writer and organizer of the FTC team notebook, FTC portfolio, FTC judging room script, and other ideas that display the team like posters in the pit.
The FTC Notebook should contain all of the stuff that the team accomplished this year and can be broken down into sections. As of Writing this the notebook that is most complete is the notebook from 2024-2025 season Into The Deep (This could be outdated though if it is update).
The FTC portfolio should essentially be a hyper focused notebook. As of 2025 there is two main ways that it can be written. To choose between what should be written is by either team decision but it can also be by what you feel the best about or team success. The main ways are team focused on what the team has been able to learn over the season and how much they were able to grow and succeed. The other way is incredibly focused on the robot and what it has been able to accomplish over the season and all of the specs of it (2024-2025 notebook was written in this style).
The FTC presentation script. The script should be written by the team members that are going to say that part so that they can feel most comfortable about what they are going to say. If this doesn't happen though which is likely you should ask people what they want to talk about and then have them memorze that script or at least the main ideas of it. This script should follow the portfolio and talk about similar stuff so whatever choice you made with the porfolio the do that for the script.
Open Alliance Writer: The First FTC Wol is the Open Alliance Writer. Their main goal is to write all of the FTC Open Alliance entries. There should be an open alliance post at the end of every week, and it should detail all of the work that the team did over the week. Put in photos to further show what we have done. It is an absolute requirement that you should be able to post multiple photos, to get this you should spend a couple of hours on Chief Delphi and comment on some posts. Make sure that you dont just include robot progress but also team progress and events that the team would be going to or hosting.
Section 3 | Personal Section
Section 3 | Personal Section
This is a personal section of what past Wol's did over there time and is to highlight what went well and what could have needed improvement. The point of this section should be so that people don't make the same ones that were made in the past and can be a collection of ways people have solved problems in the past. There is no format to this it should just be a short exert of your thoughts on your role and what you were able to do this season.
Austin Benedicto 2024-2025 : Made before we defined Open Alliance Writer and Notebook Writer
Now I'm going to start out by telling you what stuff that works really well for me. the biggest thing that really helped me in my journey was by making sure that I communicated often and clearly with my fellow Co captain Nate Johnson. we talked pretty much every single day about hey this is what we want to do and this is what the next steps that we started going to have to do to be able to make this happen. Another thing to actually worked really well for me this season was having a very friendly and open pit during competitions. at competitions a lot of people came up to our pit and talk to me purely because I was standing outside of it and I was super willing to talk to anybody, this let us to create a lot of pretty friendly relationships with people especially battery battalion that we were really able to come in contact with and talk with at Utica. so I would sort of say that like always try to keep people in the front of the pit and have people that are super friendly answering questions and being really talkative and having really good people skills because even compared to Green Team that was right next to us they're pit was a little more closed off and teams didn't necessarily come to them as much they came to people like me purely because I was staying outside the pet answering questions and I showed teams everything that they want see if they want to see past prototypes I showed it to them if they want to know about our process I told him everything I knew.
Now I'm going to talk to you about the stuff that didn't really work well for me in my tenure. the few things that really caught up to me you was making sure that I did 90 minutes of work a week. this was pretty easy in the beginning when we still had a very active open lines post and we were and I was doing that about every other week to get the 90-minute credit. but as soon as we qualify for States I sort of had a loss in motivation to do work because I have a hard time justifying that this work was going to battle of the team because I had a impression going in states that we were not going to be able to go on to Worlds. that was based on the trajectory of the team as we were said as a learning team and we were really meant to win so I just had a really hard time justifying the work that I was going to be doing so I really did slack off. so what I would add as a piece of advice to anybody doing this further is like making sure that you continue to have the motivation to do work for the team whether that be writing more knowledge base articles, or like helping program build the robot even more and get it to an even more polished state that also works as well. another thing I actually really struggled with during the season was creating both a portfolio and a presentation script. the portfolio I didn't really have a lot of experience on and there was no model for me to really work after so the initial model that we use and submitted that actually pretty poorly and didn't really lead us to win any awards so it took a lot of effort from the whole team really to be able to put this thing together and help fix it. This was similar with the FTC presentation script as I wrote the entire script pretty much alone without much team interaction so it really turned into this thing that I created and everyone else was going to say and the whole team really didn't like that so we ended up doing for later competitions is having everyone right their own part which let us do a lot better because everyone felt more comfortable in the stuff that they were doing and producing and they feel like they're truly producing a good product. another thing that I think I could have improved on this season would have been delegation of work during the process of writing the portfolio the notebook and the script I sort of just felt really swamped with all the work that I was just super burned out before we even had gone to our first competition and it sort of destroyed my motivation to do a lot more work because I felt like I work so hard and especially with the poor results it didn't go anywhere.
One big thing that I'll put a caution on for anybody that's doing this role in the future is that make sure you have a lot of interest in building the robot and that you can contribute to that because working on the notebook and script and all this stuff is going to get you Awards but when your team is not really focused super heavily on Awards it's not really the be all end all. So I would actually encourage that a lot of your time outside of school shouldn't just be doing this writing stuff to also be having and programming because that is what's in the end going to really further the team getting farther into the season and potentially moving on to worlds. I would also encourage you to think if you're ever working too hard take a break and never really let yourself get burnt out because that's only going to degrade the product that you are able to produce out and the motivation that you have especially if you work super hard and you don't get good results to the competition it's only going to hurt your mental state even more and I would say one of the most important things is you got to work for a whole year so you really want to make sure you never burn yourself out and that even if you do have to take a week off that it might be worth it to make sure that you are keeping a good mental mindset of not burning yourself out because that's never going to lead to anything good.
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