We havn’t sent out a Carl Hayden Robotics Club update in a long time (June?). We have been very busy though doing presentations and such, but now it’s time to send out our “updates”.

It is competition time for the Carl Hayden Robotics team. Our schedule is:

March 9-11, FIRST Robotics, Arizona Regional, Phoenix AZ http://www.usfirst.org/frc/map/index.lasso?page=areasearch&area=AZ-USA

April 27-29, FIRST Robotics, National Championship, Atlanta GA

June 23-24, MATE ROV, National Championship, Houston TX
http://www.marinetech.org/rov_competition/index.php


The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is now an international event. http://www.usfirst.org/robotics/ This year’s game was announced January 7th. A thousand high schools began designing, building, and testing their robot and they had to be shipped by February 21st. We will next see “Karen”, our robot, at the Coliseum in Phoenix for our regional competition.

The Arizona regional, one of 40 regional competitions, will be attended by 50 high school teams. Twenty teams are form AZ, the remainder from around the U.S., Canada, and our “adopted” team from Mexico City.

While we hope we do well in the robotics competition, our sights are set on the Chairman’s Award. It is the highest award for the team that best exemplifies the sprit of FIRST and is help up as a role model. We won the award in Arizona last year and come in second best in the Atlanta Nationals.

We will keep you posted on our competition

WIRED’s La Vida Robot http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/robot.html brought a lot of public attention to the kids and their accomplishments in science and technology. The four students in the article are doing very well:

Oscar is a sophomore at ASU majoring in mechanical engineering. He started ASU’s ROV team and will be competing with ASU at the Houston competition!

Luis is at the Scottsdale Culinary Arts school and will be a Cordon Blue Chef and will have a degree in restaurant management.

Cristian and Lorenzo are Hayden seniors. Cristian will be going into the Ira Fulton School of Engineering at ASU and Lorenzo will be going to the local community college.

All four have “full ride” scholarships and very bright futures. The best news, is that these opportunities are not limited to the “La Vida Four”.

A businessman from Oregon heard about the kids and wanted to help. He started the Maecenas Fund to support hard working, aspiring students like ours to succeed in college. The Maecenas fund is going to provide support to four of our students. www.MaecenasFund.org

ASU inaugurated a new scholarship for high school students who have been in academic competitions like FIRST and the MATE ROV event. One of our students (Oscar) received that award.

Basically, every senior in the robotics club for the last three years has gone on to college or the military, most with scholarships. Their success is having a profound effect on many of the other kids at school who never thought they had a chance at a middle class American life.

During the next few months, we will email updates on the team and some of the individual students. If you do not wish to receive these notes, just let me know. A lot of last year’s reports are at: http://falconrobotics.blogspot.com/

Further information on just about all the stuff we do can be found at: http://www.phxhs.k12.az.us/education/club/club.php?sectiondetailid=27681&sc_id=1128473844