EngiNerds

Check out our main website!

We are First^® Tech Challenge Team 9356, EngiNerds. Our team is comprised of fifteen 10th graders from Waukee High School. We practice on Mondays and Wednesdays after school at the Vince Meyer Learning Center in Waukee. We are really fortunate to have such a beautiful space to express our love for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, also known as STEM, which is the basis for our work. We share this space with all other Waukee FTC teams. This allows us to collaborate with younger teams from our district which enables us to act as mentors.

Our team is composed of many smaller groups that each have individual roles. Our Building and Design team are first tasked with making a detailed design that we can later create with the tools and materials at our disposal. Our Programmers then make multiple programs that the robot needs to follow. One type of program they work on is the autonomous. This gives the robot preprogrammed instructions to follow on its own. The other type of program is the TeleOp, otherwise known as the Driver Control Period. TeleOp stands for “Movement Operation,” so our drivers use a controller to move the robot and complete tasks.

There are also other groups that are ‘non robot-based.” These teams are known as ‘soft skills’ groups. One of these is the finance team. They are responsible for getting the team sponsors and grants. They also keep track of team deposits and withdraws. The other soft skills team is Marketing and outreach. This team is responsible for creating cool team merchandise, providing general information and highlights about our team to the public, and finding outreach opportunities to spread the ideals of FTC and STEM.

Though we work separately on some tasks, every groups interest is in the success of the team. We work hard to make our goals become reality because we all love engineering and robots.

Thank you for your time,

Sincerely Team 9356 EngiNerds