4/10: A New FRC Team

This will be a blog about the start of a new FIRST Robotics Team at Northwestern High School, in Howard County, Indiana.

My goal with this site is to document and track the creation, development, and operation of a new FIRST Robotics Team.  However, before we get into all of that, I need to give out some background on this effort, and why this is happening.

Background:

I have been fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, and I have been wise enough to take advantage of this opportunity.  In 1992, I was a newly hired engineer at Delphi (then Delco Electronics) here in Kokomo, Indiana.  Coincidentally, during the same month I started my job, co-workers of mine started as mentors on the Kokomo High School robotics team who was competing in the initial year of the US FIRST competition.  Six years later, in the fall of 1997, I joined the team, now called the TechnoKats.  When I joined the team, my oldest daughter, Rachel, was less than 1 year old.

Here is a pic of Rachel at the 2001 FIRST Championships, with Mary, myself and many other FIRSTers in the background.

While a mentor on TechnoKats, I made great friends, had outstanding experiences and blessed opportunities.  We had much success on the field, and more success off, as many students benefited from the program.  During that time, I even found a way to start a company with a friend of mine, Mark Koors, and we created AndyMark, Inc.  Mark and I had tremendous support from our wives and families as we did this, and even had the opportunity to leave Delphi and work at AndyMark full time.

During the past 14 years, I have experienced great, difficult, challenging, overwhelming, and extremely worthwhile times on TechnoKats.  Joining that team was one of the best decisions I made in my life.  Also, it has been great to see the Kokomo community grow and embrace project-based robotics education, as Western High School and Taylor High School both have FIRST Robotics Competition teams along with Kokomo High School.  Also, Eastern High School and Northwestern High School have Vex Robotics programs in their high schools.

A new decision:

Mary (my wife of 16 years), myself and our three daughters live in the Northwestern School District.  For the past 14 years, we have all been TechnoKats.  The girls have red and blue t-shirts, know present and past team members, and have traveled to more robotics competitions than they remember.  They grew up knowing FIRST.  Mary has been very supportive of me in my mentoring efforts, and unconditionally supportive of me when we started AndyMark back in 2004.  So, we knew that the day would come that Rachel may want to be on a FIRST Robotics Team.  A year ago, she has decided that this is something she wants to do.  Our choices for her involvement (and her sisters’ future involvement) came to be these:

1.  Start a new FRC team, at Northwestern High School (this would need to be approved by the Superintendent and Principal, of course)

2.  Join the TechnoKats

3.  Start a new team, not affiliated with a school

For various reasons, the Baker family (it was a dinner conversation many nights) decided to seek option 1.  I contacted Ryan Snoddy, the Northwestern School Corporation Superintendent and started a discussion with him.  (actually, that is not quite true… we talked about this 8-9 years ago, and then he reminded me about it during the fall of 2010)

So, Ryan seemed to be looking forward to this moment.  He invited me to make a presentation to him and Dr. Tim Edsell, the principal at Northwestern High School.  After that presentation, both of these guys were not scared off yet, so I proceeded to invite them to the Boilermaker Regional VIP lunch during this past March.  Mr. Snoddy and Dr. Ryan both attended lunch, were toured around by Ellen Ewbank and Glenda Hernandez (two TechnoKat lead students) at the event, and got their perspective as students.  At this event, Dr. Edsell said that they can get a teacher to support the team.  (this was the big contingency for me, as getting a teacher on board to lead one of these teams is an immense job).  Also during, Mr. Snoddy asked me to help present this beginning of a new FRC team to the Northwestern School Board.

So, our board meeting is this coming Thursday.  Dr. Edsell says that the slate is clean, and they want me to make a pitch on the program, highlighting these points:

1.   Benefits to the students and school

2.  Costs and income (sponsorships, fundraisers) needed to run the team

3.  Make-up of the team (number of students, mentors)

I suppose that we need to make up some powerpoint presentations.

14 years of being in FIRST, and I’m on a new, rookie team.  This is gonna be exciting.