Our Story
Our team was conceived in 2015, when a group of kids interested in either robotics and programming—or both—came together to learn and explore the skills and experience of being in a robotics team. Although we hail from a wide range of schools and age groups and have different interests outside of robotics, we were able to find each other online because of our shared interest in exploring robotics. We all recognize that with the advent of new technology, many of the skills we learn from robotics will help us contribute to the science and engineering world in the future. The First Tech Challenge program is perfect for our team and our goals because it allows us to acquire new skills in engineering, computer science, and physics, learn how to progressively and positively interact with others while still competing as opponents, and to improve our leadership and communication skills.
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 not being redundant 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. We called this kind of open-minded thinking in design “Innovative and Creative Engineering” and established it as the second part of our team name. These values are very important to us because they help us use our participation in FTC to learn important transferable skills such as teamwork, integrity, and leadership even in the presence of a challenging and competitive environments. We are passionate about integrating both the DRY ICE principles and Gracious Professionalism in how we design and build our robots, celebrate our different opinions and interests, and how we represent the engineering community during our outreach events. |
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