Meet the Team!
Design, Build, Program, Document, Repeat!
Hello there! We are FTC Team 12833 Mechanical Meltdown. We are based in Watkins Glen, NY, with members from multiple surrounding counties in the Finger Lakes area. Our team is comprised of youth in 7th through 12th grade. We explore many STEM skills including Designing, Building, Programming, Technical Documentation (Notebookers), and CAD (Computer-Aided Design); all folowing the engineering design process.
Learn
We learn many skills to help us succeed in robotics and other aspects of things we do including brainstorming, designing, building, programming, CAD (Computer Aided Design), documentation, teamwork, fundraising, problem solving, and many more. These abilities help us design and create our ideas.
Design
We brainstorm and design our ideas before building and testing them. We bounce ideas off each other, draw pictures, and create CAD models before moving onto creating the design. This allows team members to learn valuable skills like teamwork for the real world.
Create
After coming up with a design, we move onto building it. The whole team works together like a huge machine to bring our idea to life. Once the design is created, we test it and continue to improve it, making it the best it can be. This means following the design process, which you can learn more about in "What is FIRST?".
To help prepare kids for the real world, the team has two fantastic mentors, coupled with a team goal to teach new members so they are ready to take the place of senior members. We also make an effort to have outreach with many different outlets so that ever member gets the information that they need and want. We have also mentored another FTC team which taught all members involved how to communicate and work with people they have just met on a severe technical scale. Our team also implements the engineering notebook as a required element of the team. This allows all members to have a basic grasp on documentation and writing. We do this because in any field of work, you will be documenting your work and this is a great way to prepare for this!
