AHS Robotics Team 3024

FIRST Team 3024 ("My Favorite Team") is a robotics club at Ashland High School, Ashland Oregon.  Our team participates with thousands of other high school teams in the International FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) program which connects science and technology professionals in the community with students, mentoring and inspiring the students to be excited by the challenges of science and to pursue careers in related fields. Our team grew from 8 to 25 students in 2014, and from has since hovered between 25 and 30 students.

FIRST encompasses programs at many grade levels. Team 3024 participates in the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) at the high school level.  While the team operates throughout the school year, the primary season begins in January when FIRST releases details of the game challenge for that year.  The team then has 6 weeks to design, fabricate, and test a robot to play the game in regional and international competitions throughout the spring.

The game is sufficiently challenging that no team has sufficient resources in budget, tools, expertise, and especially time to build an optimal solution.  In addition to technical skills, students learn to raise funds, make public presentations, budget resources, work as a team, and manage risk, developing leadership skills and self-confidence that lead to success in  any field.

We are infinitely grateful to our generous sponsors. Their financial and material support makes it possible for us to build the best robot we possibly can and to take our team to the competitions. Some typical costs of this are:

• competition entry fees: $13,000
• parts for our 2 robots (we keep a spare for practice): $5,000
• machines & tools: $2,000
• team travel to competitions: $5,000
• travel to the World Championship: $5,000

Our wonderful sponsors realize that STEM (science-technology-engineering-math) is exciting and fun to learn about, and they recognize that today's teens may become tomorrow's engineers, finding and creating solutions to real-world problems. We could not get there without our sponsors. Please become one!