Rocket Beavers

Rocket Beavers

Rocket Beavers is a robotics team of highly motivated students from Avon Old Farms School. With various skills such as Engineering, Programming, and 3D Modeling, we share a common passion for the field of robotics.

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About Team and School

We are the Avon Old Farms Rocket Beavers and this is our fifth year competing in FIRST Tech Challenge. We attend Avon Old Farms School, an all-boys preparatory school in Avon, Connecticut. We work out of the Forge, a recently-renovated building on our campus. Built in 1925, it was Avon’s original Blacksmithing building where most of the campus's door knobs, hinges, and lampposts were handcrafted in the early days of the school. Two years ago it was renovated to create a space of our emerging program. This past year, we also converted the attached water tower into a computer lab.

Team Goals

Since we are a relatively inexperienced team, we are working to learn what we need to do to be successful. Ultimately our team’s goal this year is to continue creating a solid foundation for the team. We also hope to make it do the state competition. One big aspect of the competition that we would like to improve on is our engineering notebook. We have played around with different templates. But still do not have a template that we think is sustainable and aesthetically pleasing. Also, by scoring better in competitions, we hope to attract more student interest in the program for the future.

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Outreach

Website

One of the outreach programs, the website, is designed to provide information about who we are, and what we are doing. The website not only advertises our team but also advocates for increased participation in STEM fields. HyunJun planned to create a webpage at the beginning of our season, and he updated the information daily or weekly. Although providing information to the public is also important, we never lost the potential towards our main goal.
The website is targeted towards the Avon Old Farms community as part of our sustainability goals. We want as much information as possible to be available to the student body and prospective students so that we can bring in new members of the team.

Cooperation with Avon Middle School

After the first competition, our team and the Avon Middle School team, 10820 the Cyber Dragons, decided to have a few joint practices. They reached out to us because they realized in the first competition that their field is not set up correctly. Through this opportunity, we were able to communicate about our robot designs as well as some programming problems. We also made an alliance strategy in case we are put together in the Wolcott competition.

GitHub

Much of our source code and CAD models for our 3D-printed parts are available to the public on the team's GitHub:

https://github.com/AvonOldFarmsRobotics

https://github.com/Nitro1231/AOF-Robotics-Web

https://github.com/Nitro1231/3D-Models/tree/master/Robotics

We are happy to provide these digital resources to other teams for their references.

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Business Plan

We have two main sources of funding for our team. A few years ago we received a grant from the Edwards family to help remodel the Tower into a computer lab. We had $5,771 at the beginning of the year remaining from that grant to help support the team. A previous team member’s family also donated $2,500 last year for the team to use.

With these funds, we have been able to buy tools, such as a miter saw. We have also begun buying more raw materials like extrusion. This will allow the money that we have been given so far to support the team for a few years. We also keep a goal of reusing the materials every time we build our test or competition robot.

Through email, the school's social media, and our website, the team has also been reaching out to other members of the community in hopes to acquire additional funds for the future. We are lucky to be in an environment where parents and local businesses are willing to support us.

Sustainability Plan

Our team is recognized as a competitive afternoon activity in our school, and per our school’s policy, every student is required to participate in two (one for seniors) seasons of a competitive afternoon activity. So, our team naturally draws students who are strongly interested in the STEM fields.

We also aim to attract more students by achieving a higher place in competitions.