accepting, supportive community, with teachers acting more as mentors, and the traditional lines of communication transformed.
This is the culture, the breeding ground, of the Vitruvian Bots -- named after the diagram of the ideal man done by Da Vinci, archetypal Renaissance artist, scientist, and engineer who learned by doing. In our case, the ideal man is a robot, and he's going to be awesome!
This is our third year taking part in FIRST. We have amazing support from the school, financially as well as emotionally - lacking an organized sports program, we are truly the school's #1 team. We've brought our family spirit from Da Vinci to our robotics team, and multiplied it a hundred-fold through hours and days and weeks of collaboration, design, prototyping, and building. Not to mention the singing and dancing - our dance team never fails to brighten up the mood when energy is low and the drill bit broke yet again.
This family feeling is what makes our team succeed. Or team family environment makes us comfortable working together and expressing our ideas. We get the best ideas out there, and improve them together through strong communication. Contributing our strongest abilities to the team, we become equal members by welcoming input from everyone. We have close and strong relationships among the grades, in part because of our mixed grade advisory groups, and because of our family-like traditions of the oldest grades helping the youngest, and the youngest wanting to emulate them. This welcoming philosophy has enabled us to work together to create multiple prototypes of each robot component, considering all
possible improvements to end up with an efficient, beautiful design that has earned us the Highest Seed Rookie award. And this family culture pulled us through when "dad" - lead robotics teacher Aaron Tostado or "Toast" - had appendicitis and needed to take a little break for hospitalization and surgery at the height of the build season. "Uncle" Fuzz - lead mentor Fazlul Zubair - stepped in and everyone, obliged by a sense of duty to the family, worked extra hard to get us through successfully. We didn't lose hope. We leaned on each other to succeed, and we are excited for this year's and future competitions.
So, we are a unique team at a unique school, and we're also fortunate to be in a unique location -- the number of people living in the district is less than the number of people working there...and most of them are at high-tech aerospace and other engineering firms. Being situated in proximity to these companies has given us great access to sponsors, mentors, and expertise. We believe that this is a significant opportunity for spreading the word about FIRST to those companies and the professionals who work there. This asset has greatly influenced the amount of communication that occurs between passionate team members and engineers, scientists, designers, and other professionals. As a new team, we have not yet fully capitalized on these resources and we're just now hitting our stride in terms of marketing FRC and letting people know how cool FIRST is. But we are right on track in creating strong and long lasting ties with real-world engineers. Already we have had the pleasure and special privilege of visiting many of the facilities of the spectacular engineering companies around our school. One very memorable moment for many team members was when the California Science Center Director attended and spoke at our school's academic awards night banquet about the engineering challenges in moving the retired space shuttle Endeavour across L.A.! We've even participated in events at our local community college, El Camino, on their Engineering Day.