We participate in the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC), which is one of the competitions in the FIRST organization. We encourage you to go to the FIRST website (www.firstinspires.org) to get a better understanding of the program. In short, the teams will be working together to build a small robot that is capable of performing a series of tasks, both in autonomous and teleoperated modes, to compete in a “challenge” or game, which changes every year (i.e., you would not be able to compete successfully using the robot you built the year before!). Every year a challenge will be announced worldwide in September. The game is announced (with video presentation and detailed game rules) on the FIRST web site.
Once this year’s challenge is announced, the team will have approximately 7 months to completely build, program, and test a competition robot over the course of the season At a minimum, we will participate in the Austin Metro League meets and the Austin Metro League Champtionship. If we do well enough, then we will advance to the Central Texas Regionals and then Worlds. We also participate in the TAPPS State robotics competition.
It should be emphasized that, while the ultimate goal is certainly to build a robot capable of competing in the challenge, the broader goals of the FIRST organization are to promote the full engineering process – design, modeling, building, programming, community service, documentation, presentation, cooperation, team spirit, and troubleshooting. In fact, the top prize at all FIRST competitions (the Inspire Award) is NOT necessarily given to the team who “wins” the competition – it is given to the team which best combines all the attributes listed above.
The Iron Eagles Robotics team was founded in 2009 (the first year of operation for Savio). Our founder and director is a mechanical engineer at National Instruments (who is a major supporter of the FIRST program). Our meeting times are set for Monday thru Thursday, 4:30 – 6:30 with occasional Saturday build days from 9:00 - 5:00.
To teach us everything we would ever want to know about robots we have 4 amazing mentors: Michael Butler, Mike Gregorio, Scott Barnes, and Alex Thurlow.
Additionally to oversee us and guide us in the engineering design process we have 2 awesome faculty sponsors: Sylvia Wood and Ann Marie Girardot.
St. Dominic Savio Catholic High School is a co-educational college preparatory school founded by the Diocese of Austin to prepare young men and women to become faith-filled, visionary and inspirational leaders in service to the Church and the world.