TEAM 4201

The Vitruvian Bots is a team of about 40 students who are committed to showing the youth of their community how fun math, science, and engineering can be from Da Vinci Science high school located in Hawthorne, California. The team believes that it is never too early to teach young kids topics that will help them throughout their lives. This is important because studies show that the United States math and sciences scores among high schools are rapidly decreasing. The change starts in you, are you going to take the chance?

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The past week has been PACKED with work. So much is going on. The pyramid is near completion and today we had a successful testing of the arm. Working late into schools nights and weekends have proven to be a successful routine for the Vitruvian Bots. The next steps will attaching our arm to the drive train, attaching the electronics, and finishing up the programming by the end of the week. Hopefully by Saturday we will have a prototype to really test with! The raw materials will also be coming this week, it's so exciting.

Great job team!

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Awesome work day for the Vitruvian Bots. Watch out for us this March!

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Pictures taken from the first half of our work day today, and plenty more to come. Go, Vitruvian Bots!

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Hey there, fellow FIRST teams!

Team 4201 (The Vitruvian Bots) is having another complete work day, dedicated to building a test pyramid, prototyping a shooter, building arms, prototyping the Ant, and making some programming decisions.

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Working hard to get ready for tomorrow's presentations. Everyone wants to have the best design.

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Today, we've got an official work day.

The two temporary teams are modifying and perfecting designs as much as possible for their big presentations as the spirit and business teams find out whether we'll be doing shirts or hoodies this year, maybe even both! DIY buttons might also be in the near future and a new mascot is being put into consideration. Also, our wonderful wheels came in today.

GO TEAM!

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A Summary of Our Day

Today was a busy FIRST day, beginning with Kick Off. Once we got to our home turf, we got right to reading the manual and took a test on tool safety provided by our wonderful mentors. One of our mentors took our two team leaders (Marc and Ruqayya) to get our Kit of Parts. As soon they got back, it time for Kit Bot Build. The team branched our to wear they were assigned and the design for a prototype began, along with the building of the practice arena and a full organ transplant from Leo to the new robot.

Good job, team!

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A continuation of the day, playing a game of frisbee and presenting designs and ideas.

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Kick Off Day continues, with the transformation of Leo into a new bot.

We took his old parts and used them as our new drive train, reprogramming and using a belt system instead of our gear-and-chain set-up from last year.

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Kick Off Day of 2013.

This is our second season as part of the FIRST community after winning the Highest Rookie Seed Award in the Los Angeles regional at the Long Beach arena. We are looking forward for a great season this year and can't wait to see what other teams come up with.

The day was spent being split into groups to handle different tasks: taking apart our old robot Leo, putting together the kit bot, researching and creating designs, and even putting together a prototype launcher.

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Today was the first official training day for our Vitruvian bots.

Fuz opened up our meeting with the agenda and we played some team building games to put emphasis on the importance of planning and drafting in order to make things that are hard, be easier through thorough preparation.

For the second half of the day, we researched previous FRC competitions such as Lunacy 2009, Overdrive 2008, Aim High 2006, and so much more. We split into groups of five and prepared a presentation for the rest of the team and explained the competitions, what the robots were like, the strategies they used to win the game, and the teams that one and why.

For the last hour of our meeting, we split into our different teams such as build, programming, electronics, safety, and documentation to discuss with our fellow members what will go down during the season. It is important to plan ahead!

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Today we got to fundraise for FRC by selling some awesome tacos that one of our team member's parents got to help out with. It was a rainy day and students rushed after school toward the smell of grilled onions and carne asada. We also set up the forum for our first Engineering Exposition, where students got to present for their PLTW classes the community was invited to and especially to our special guests, the engineers! It was a lovely opportunity to listen to their stories and what they do, especially with the question and answer period. 

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So today was inventory day for the Vitruvian Bots.

The team came in today and cleaned up and organized from last season. We went through materials, categorized them, and threw away what we don't need. We also took apart the basketball hoop we used to practice last year with our robot Leo. A majority of our team members also used some wood (and scrap wood! Keeping it resourceful here) to create shelves and boxes for all of our materials, both for FRC and our PLTW classes. 

So much labor work, good job team!