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| Happy Halloween Aragon Ro-BOO-tics members, alumni, and parents !! This month’s newsletter spotlights two new mentors, Gail Tanaka and Dr Phil Roan, Mr. Geary Chew’s new innovation, and outstanding member George Tao. |
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| | Upcoming Events 🗓️
November 20: Fall Community Night: Come and see what Aragon Robotics has accomplished this semester! November 14: George Hall Elementary School Expo: We’ll be showing off our robot and KiwiCo kits at their science fair! |
| | | | Gail Tanaka, Trent Tanaka’s mother, is a new addition to Aragon Robotics this year. She primarily mentors Marketing, as she has spent a career working for large advertising agencies as well as tech companies such as Adobe. So far, Tanaka has been hosting brainstorming sessions on goals and messaging with the Marketing team. |
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| “I hope that every time you have a project, you have a strategy in place,” Tanaka said. “We’re building the foundations so that we don’t have to recreate the wheel every year, but instead we're building on top of it every year.” She has several ideas for the development of the team, including how to reach donors and how to get consistent messaging across to establish a stronger brand for Aragon Robotics. Beyond implementing brainstorming sessions, Tanaka wants to help improve the overall prioritization process within the team, strengthening the structure of communication and content creation. She appreciates the teamwork in Robotics, which reflects a real company. “[It’s] ultimately what you'll learn when you work in business,” Tanaka said. “It’s about collaboration skills and people skills.” Tanaka first became interested in marketing in high school with encouragement from her mother, after reading books and learning from a professional in an advertising agency. Having had a successful career in advertising and marketing, she has accumulated many skills and experiences, which she hopes to teach AR members to help drive the team to have more impact on donations to support competitions. |
| Outside of her job and AR, Tanaka has other things keeping her occupied. She spends time with her two rough collies, Rio and Zephyr. Tanaka is also actively involved in the Japanese American community, including serving on the board of Kimochi, a Bay Area nonprofit organization that helps senior citizens based on the Japanese tradition of care and support. |
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| | | | Dr. Phil Roan is a new addition to the Aragon Robotics family as a mentor for our FTC and MATE team. Previously, Roan worked with Gunn High School’s Robotics Team but decided to help out the local community since his kids will attend Aragon in the future. |
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| Roan has a PhD in electrical engineering with a focus on surgical robotics and professionally writes software tools for robot software developers. In the past, he has also worked in development, hardware, electrical engineering, embedded firmware, all the way up to management. Because of its complex system and various capabilities, Roan enjoys the realm of robotics.
“At the end of the day, you interact with the real world,” Roan said. “It's not just taking stuff in, but you actually get to push back.”
Since seeing the 6 subteam division, Roan was excited to see the different interactions. However, he believes that much of the team is disjointed with ideas not being passed around as much as he hoped. As a mentor, he hopes to help strengthen these relationships.
“They tend to produce the analysis or documentation that they should do,” Roan said. “But I want them to be able to pass on their knowledge to the next generation [of] students.”
He also has a unique approach to his mentoring, as he prefers to ask questions to guide students in the right direction rather than telling them. This way they are more likely to follow through instead of ignoring him.
Aside from being involved in robotics, Roan enjoys going to his kid’s sporting events and baking. Prior to the pandemic, he began experimenting with making sourdough. Once the pandemic hit, he decided it was a perfect excuse to perfect his skills. |
| | | Geary Chew, a longtime mentor for the technical teams of Aragon Robotics, showcases his newest project, a repurposed electric wheelchair, to the team. |
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| Several years ago, a couple that Chew met at the county fair generously donated a few old wheelchairs. He decided to begin the project by removing the seat and fixing the mechanics of the base, allowing his students to work on it as a programming challenge.
“I have a couple ideas like a hallway monitor,” Chew said. “You can use it for Halloween and hang a skeleton, or put an inflatable and move it around. The other idea was to use it at a football game; it can actually go on the grass since it has big wheels as opposed to a tiny robot.”
Chew explains that it isn’t necessarily limited to FRC but can be showcased at outreach events and as advertising for the business teams. As a side project, Chew has been working on a t-shirt cannon that he hopes to put on the electric wheelchair base and bring it to competitions.
When he was younger, Chew enjoyed taking things apart and rebuilding them to figure out how they work. Because of this, he’s very excited for the upcoming printer dissection where students will take apart inkjet printers.
“The mechanism, the whole printer, is actually really remarkable, how it was put together, manufactured and snapped together,” Chew said. “It's like a puzzle.”
With this activity, Chew hopes the design process will be easier for students, encouraging them to build modularly, allowing servicing to be easier. |
|  | | | | | Junior George Tao is the mechanical lead of FRC this year and has been a crucial member of the team since his freshman year. Tao was design lead in sophomore year and took on the job of working on the fabrication alongside being in charge of the robot’s design. |
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| He plans for FRC to make a more purpose-driven robot, focusing on simplicity and strategy rather than versatility, to increase the efficiency of the team so that there is more time for programming. Although the large size and speed of the robot are difficult to work with, it also makes the challenge more exciting for Tao.
“[We] really have to take everything into account and make sure that [our] robots are very structurally sound,” Tao said. “It's a really fun engineering challenge, and the competition aspect itself is also really fun.”
His favorite part of FRC is the travel competitions. Besides the competition factor, Tao also enjoys the team bonding that occurs while out of school.
“When you travel, you get to be in hotels with your friends,” Tao said. “We went on shopping runs and put Adam Richter [FRC Captain] in a shopping cart.”
Outside of FRC’s main robot, Tao is working on several projects, including a beach-cleaning robot with FTC’s Kostas Ginis (11). They came up with this idea during the Environmental Design competition for Aragon’s Biotech club last year, where they won first place. Instead of abandoning the project, they decided to reinvest the award money into building an improved version.
“Another thing that I'm working on with Adam Richter is this omnicart, which is a go-kart using similar but much larger versions of the swerve modules that we use in FRC. ” Tao said. “We designed everything from scratch and the plan is for it to be rideable. We have the CAD completely finished for the first version, and now we’re working on setting up a nonprofit. It’s really time intensive.”
Despite many responsibilities in Robotics, Tao also has many hobbies, including playing bass in Jazz ensemble. He occasionally plays tennis and golf and enjoys drawing in his free time. |
| | | | Newsletter Writers: Sophia Cheng, Julia Chang
Newsletter Editors: Ethan Tawn, Ellen Li |
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