The Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy’s Robotics Team 1717 has completed their six-week build season by packing a 5-foot-tall black and gold robot into a wooden crate and shipping it off to the site of their first competition.
Since Jan. 8, Team 1717, also known as the D’Penguineers, has been designing and fabricating a robot that will compete in this year’s FIRST Robotics Challenge — Logomotion.
After school, on weekends, rain or shine, students and mentors of Team 1717 stayed late into the evening and often into the early mornings to work on various components for the robot. During the season, the team spent its time brainstorming, prototyping and researching different products and mechanisms, and designing, machining and programming.
As it is every year, Team 1717 is made up entirely of seniors in the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy who have never competed in the FIRST Robotics Challenge. In only a few short weeks, the group of rookie seniors gained valuable new skills and experience through this intensive project, and a new understanding of what they are capable of achieving.
The D’Penguineers now have less than two weeks until their first regional competition — time that will be spent refining the few extra mechanisms that FIRST teams are allowed to install on their robots at the competition, practicing driving the robot and resting.
With Tuesday’s release of The New Cool by Neal Bascomb — a book detailing the experiences of several FIRST teams, focusing on Team 1717 and their accomplishments — and the team’s first regional in San Diego on March 12, the DPEA is looking forward to an action-packed month of competitions.
— Megha Manjunath, Aislinn Dunne, Patrick Holmes, Connie Phung and Noah Connally are students in the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy.
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