When we decided to become an FTC team, we wanted to remind ourselves of our engineering principles by reflecting them in our team name. Hence, we choose the name “Dry Ice,” which is an acronym for “Don’t Repeat Yourself" and “Innovative and Creative Engineering”. “Don’t repeat yourself" is actually a software engineering principle in the book The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas. It is based on the logic, predominantly used in computer science, that by not being redundant while coding will limit the amount of errors that may occur as changes in a single element will hence no longer affect other elements.
Besides using DRY as an effective coding methodology, our team interprets the DRY principle to withhold its value in other areas, like design and communication, as a way of adapting and learning from our mistakes in the past. In addition to the DRY principle, our team wanted to express our motivation for being a FIRST participant and because we are a group of people with diverse activities and interests outside of school, we held a meeting to come to a general consensus about our interest in FIRST.
After several minutes of discussion and getting to know one another’s interests, we discovered our common ground. We all wanted to use our participation in FIRST to expand our knowledge in a way that we can apply in all of our future careers. As we saw it, FIRST was not just about doing robotics, it was also about learning to think creatively and not just intuitively, compete with a positive spirit, and apply our knowledge of all different fields in order to realize innovative ideas.