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Aragon Robotics
Winter Recap Newsletter

Happy (Belated) New Year, AR Families!

In this issue, we will be covering our highlights through the winter months of November, December and January.

Look out for the special segment with Aragon Robotics alumni Guy Geva, currently a student-teacher at Aragon!

Nov. Highlight: FTC League Meet 1

On Saturday, Nov. 4, the FTC team competed at the NorCal Peninsula League in their first meet of the season.

“Our team really benefits from having the chance to first see its designs out on the field,” said FTC Captain Jessica Li. “[Then,] we will be able to reflect on [our performance and robot] and go through iterations to improve.”

There are fifteen matches in total in the league, five on each day of competition. Out of the five matches played Nov. 4, our team won one.

“Even though we didn’t do as well as we wanted, it was a learning opportunity,” said Mechanical Lead Stuti Goel. “We’re going to learn from our mistakes for our next competition.”

A part of the team consists of the drivers, who operate and help repair the robot during competition.

“Our drive team is going in and out of the pits, into the field playing, and then coming back out to fix the robot because things break in the middle of the round,” Li said.

While this takes place, the larger part of the team interacts with the other teams at the meet.

“Particularly with our [new members], we want them to go to every [other] team and talk to members that are on the sideline,” Li said. “Especially in the first meet, we're trying to scout out what teams have done, are doing, and their progression.”

To finalize their robot and prepare for this first competition, the team decided to work overtime.

“I'm really proud of the team for not giving up,” Li said. “We tried to do a lot of things [this first time], and it was very stressful.”

Since their first league meet, FTC has continued to improve their robot, adding new components such as an airplane launcher made by their new members.

Dec. Highlights: FRC Off-Season Competition & Winter Team Bonding

Winner: Team 2 A.M CAD

(Emily Peng, Remy Chow, Lucas Liu, Braden Chiu, Taylor Martin)

Runner Up: Team N.I.E

(Antonio Mangano, Aaron Xu, Akilan Paramasivam, Anish Dara, Chloe Chen)

FRC 840 held their first ever Off-Season Training Competition, “Charged Down™”!

Winter Team Bonding Marshmallow Game | Aragon Robotics 2023

At the Winter Team Bonding, the team split up into random groups to compete in a friendly Marshmallow Tower Game! Subteams also participated in fun gift exchanges through Secret Snowflake and White Elephant.

FLL Workshop

On Tuesday, Nov. 7, Aragon Robotics hosted its first FLL workshop ever, the first in a series of twelve that will take place over the course of the year. In these meetings, our members volunteer to help introduce younger children to robotics through Legos.

This series of workshops is offered to elementary schoolers. Using a FIRST-approved curriculum alongside their website and software, the workshops were planned out last spring.

“We advertised the program at EXPOs,” said Outreach coordinator Aayushi Kothari. “We talked to parents, who were interested. At one of the EXPOs, we got invited back by the principal to talk to all the fifth graders at once about our program because so many expressed interest.”

The first session, held on Nov. 7, was introductory. In it, the students learned about the different electronics in our Lego kits and watched the FLL season video from last year. They will be working on recreating last year’s season.

“Through the workshops, they'll be learning how to build different parts of a robot, and we hope that by the end, they have a functioning robot that can compete in an FLL game,” Kothari said.

With the theme “Super Powered,” the students will additionally develop an Innovation Project. They will identify problems related to energy, from generation to consumption, and develop solutions to those problems.

“Some of [the students] were very hyper, excited, [and] hands-on,” Kothari said. “Others were more shy, but once we started talking to them and getting them out of their shell, it was a really fun experience … I think they’re most looking forward to when they get to build a robot.”

Out of the 25 members who offered to volunteer to help lead this first session, 10 were selected to participate in the event.

“I was really impressed by the amount of people who signed up and were interested in doing the workshop,” Kothari said. “This was the first year we [even] had to turn people away from [this] outreach event because there were so many signups.”

Members can continue to sign up for future workshops to see how the students’ robots progress throughout the year.

Special Segment: Meet Guy Geva!

A physics major at Harvey Mudd and student-teacher at Aragon, Guy Geva is an Aragon Robotics alumni. As a freshman in 2011, Geva joined the programming team on FRC.

“I had this idea that I wanted to work for Google when I grew up and be a software engineer,” Geva said. “[However,] programming at the start [at Aragon Robotics] was overwhelming for me. Because I saw it in robotics, when I had learned programming in college, I was like, ‘I've seen this before.’ It made more sense to me then later on.”

In his second year of Robotics, Geva decided to try something new and join the mechanical team in FRC, while simultaneously becoming the captain of FTC.

“I ended up going into physics and engineering, because I also saw when we were designing and building the robots, discussions of the physics were even more interesting to me than the machining and building,” Geva said.

Geva led the newfound Outreach team as its first and only member in his junior year. Every year, Aragon Robotics used to have a tradition where members opted to bleach and dye their hair red before competitions. Geva went all-out, dying his entire head red.

[My dad] was a mentor on the team and he also dyed his hair red one year,” Geva said. “We had some people who gave themselves Mohawks, [which] might have been a one weekend thing [for a competition].”

For Geva, Aragon Robotics was filled with both a spirited community and a multitude of opportunities to explore his interests.