Business Plan
Executive Summary
Northshore High School's FIRST Robotics Team, located in Slidell, Louisiana, was established 2006 by a small group of seniors. Since then, we have expanded into a diverse family of mentoring professionals and enthusiastic students from all grades. As we implemented the values and goals of FIRST throughout the seasons, every student was able to leave the club enriched with vital science, engineering, and real-life skills. The overwhelming task of building a functioning, effective robot within six weeks challenges students to communicate, cooperate, and learn as a team. Throughout this intense timeframe team members absorb everything from project management to programming and power-drilling, dedicated to preserving science and technology. Our love for teamwork and engineering extends into the off-season with demos, volunteering, workshops, and camps throughout the state. With so many places to go and events to run, students here at Northshore discover that building the robot is only the beginning of their FIRST experience.
General Team Description
Mission statement: We are Team 1912 Combustion, from Northshore High School in Slidell, LA. We are a closely-knit family of students and mentors dedicated to spreading a love for STEM around the school and community. As a FIRST team, we regularly volunteer, demo, and mentor other teams around the area, reaching greater and more diverse audiences every season. Our goal is to transform uninterested crowds into excited spectators just as thrilled about science and engineering as we are.
- Our primary goal is to build an interest in science and engineering in a positive and enjoyable way. Through robotics, we hope to create more engineers and scientists.
- Our secondary goal is to provide students with real-world skills applicable to future careers. The students earn experience in mechanical and electrical design and fabrication, programming, and web design.
- Our final goal is to spread the message of FIRST and gracious professionalism. We educate the community about the value of science, engineering, and technology through demos and workshops for anyone from politicians to children, volunteering projects for local charities, and mentoring for other FRC and Lego League (FLL) teams alike.
Form of ownership: Team 1912's administrative student officers traditionally consist of a president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, and historian. While these members ensure that the club can function, the five heads of robot construction each lead in their respective build aspect: challenge, chassis, controls, animation, and CAD. Our safety, strategy, budget, and other support teams fulfill the miscellaneous roles required to run the team. The entire team defers to the authority of our teacher sponsor, and transitively, the direction of our high school principal. All team members and bylaws, therefore, operate within school board policy.
Team History:Team 1912 was founded in 2006, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Over the past six seasons we have attended the Bayou Regional in New Orleans, the Lone Star Regional in Houston, and International Competition in Atlanta. The team has produced seven robots, winning numerous awards, including the Chairman's Award. Our outreach has include demos in the Louisiana Capital Rotunda, numerous summer camps, city celebrations, workshops for troubled youth, partnership with local charities, animation workshops, coastal restoration, and walking in a Mardi Gras parade. For a full history of our team's accomplishments, please see our website.
Branding: Our team was assigned the number 1912 by FIRST and selected the name Team Combustion. We have selected neon blue and as our primary color and orange and yellow and secondary colors. Our motto is "Spreading the Wildfire". Our Logo is a gear being consumed by fire with 1912 superimposed overall.
Most important strengths and core competencies: Our team has much strength, but the most
important is our student involvement. Our team takes pride in having a student run team and student
built robots every year. In order for our students to benefit from our club, we have mentors that
are willing to teach students in all aspects of managing a team, and are willing to work with the
students in the building of our robots. The balance that our team has between mentor and student
involvement is definitely one of the main strengths that we pride ourselves on.
Our team also takes pride in our community involvement. Throughout the years that we have been in
operation, our team has been growing our community involvement operations. Our team helps and spreads
the message of FIRST at places across our community. We always enjoy involving ourselves in the
community. The fact that our students enjoy such work is a major advantage that our team possesses.
Significant challenges the company faces now and in the near future: The main challenge that our team faces is that of funding and sponsorship. It costs a lot of money to run our robotics team, but through the financial support that we receive from our sponsors we are able to accomplish most of the things that we would like to do as a team. If we were to receive more funding, our team would be able to increase the amount of community out-reach that we do while also giving us more opportunity to teach team members about different technologies requiring larger amounts of money. Another challenge that our team faces is finding students to continue joining our club and dedicating themselves to the club. We continue to try to expand the curriculum at Northshore to provide for opportunities for learning STEM subjects. We have a good student base, but in order for our team to continue to succeed, we must continuously recruit and tell others about the benefits involved with being on the Northshore High School's Robotics Team.
Long Term:Our team loses senior members every year, but it also gains freshman members. In
order for our team to sustain itself, we must make our team attractive to future students at our high
school as well as to students currently enrolled in our high school. In order to get new members to
join our club, the team demos robots from previous years at the beginning of every school year at our
club sign up day. We have also been involved with mentoring FLL teams at Boyet Jr. High, Little Oak
Elementary School, and Bonne Ecole Elementary School that feed students into our high school.
To keep our team going, from a financial prospective, we have sponsors that provide us funding from
year to year so that we may continue our operations. In order that we might grow our team's
operations, our team seeks out new sponsorships every year and has a team of people that writes
proposals and makes presentations to potential sponsors to win their support. To properly select the
students who give presentations to potential sponsors, we first elect a Treasurer at the end of every
season who then takes on the responsibility of assembling a team with which he or she will pursue
sponsorship opportunities. This team then uses many methods of fund seeking, including letters,
e-mails, phone calls, and presentations, to acquire funding for future purchases. Besides our
corporate sponsorships, we also sell ice cream for two weeks each year at our school during lunch.
Through these efforts, our team should be financially successful for years to come.
Products and Services
Our team builds quality robots, and has been recognized with several awards including the Quality
Award and the Excellence in Design Award. We produce several videos and animations highlighting our
overall team accomplishments as well as one focused on the robot and build season.
This year our team made several large capital investments in tooling; a drill mill, a horizontal band
saw, vertical band saw, and two drill presses were acquired. This adds to our existing inventory of a
tac welder, lathe, chop saw, a wood band saw, and an older drill press. These items have revolutionized
how we build and gives our students access to exceptional tooling, greatly enhancing the build experience.
We have made this shop equipment available to other teams.
Marketing Plan
Our team's marketing plan consists of three phases: attracting new membership, making ourselves
attractive as alliance partners, and increasing community awareness. We are also involved in mentoring
the FLL that was started at one of the Jr. High Schools feeding into our high school. Through these
efforts, we market ourselves to potential members and continue to get new members.
This year students designed a team logo. This was designed to increase our recognition and standardize
everything that we produce from documentation to tee shirts. This creates a type of permanence for the
team with respect to marketing.
While at competition, we also have a marketing plan to make our team as attractive of an alliance
partner as possible. We have a pit area that allows us to display large banners with our sponsor logos.
In addition to having these high flying banners we also always have a team of people in the pit willing
to answer any questions that a team might have as well as to make our team sound as appealing as possible.
To aid this team of students we have tri fold pamphlets with information on our team and its operations
as well as handouts with information on our robot to give out. In addition to our pamphlets and informational
handouts, we also have buttons and giveaways with our team number on them.
One of the focuses of our team is on increasing community awareness. We do this through numerous
demos throughout the year and through volunteer work. Prior to robot ship, we hold our annual media
day, when we invite our sponsors, media, politicians, family, and friends to a demonstration of our
robot's capabilities, talk about the FIRST message, and spark an interest in the fields of science and
engineering. We video all of our major milestones throughout the season and post them to several places.
By using YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, a triannual newsletter, and our website, we put out as much
information about our team as we can to raise the most awareness. Through our efforts in community
outreach and involvement, our team won the 2010 Bayou Regional Chairman's Award.
Niche: Our club has a niche in our community as the only FRC robotics club in the city, and the only organization dedicated to teaching others about math, science, and engineering through such activities as mentoring local FLL teams. We have become well known in our community and have been recognized by several newspapers by having multiple articles written on our outreach and our successes. We have also attended city council and school board meetings to be recognized for our accomplishments.
Operational Plan
Each year our team participates in the FIRST Robotics Competition. We manage our team through a student run hierarchy with mentors and teachers providing guidance. We split into five build teams, challenge, chassis, controls, animation, and CAD to work together to produce a robot at the end of a six week period. We have officers who raise funds for our team and assure that the team is functioning properly from an operational standpoint. We have a budget committee with student and mentor members who set overall budget policy and expenditures. Each build team receives a budget and can work with the committee on shortfalls and overruns.
Production: Build season is kicked off in early January when the new game unveiled. For the next six weeks, the team works three nights a week from five thirty to nine and then every Saturday from ten to four. Our robot is shipped to competition, occurring two to four weeks later. We work in a workspace provided to us by one of our sponsors, QinetiQ, and manufacture the majority of the components.
Location: Our club operates out of the second story of one of our sponsor's buildings. We have ample room to operate with a well organized build space. Planning Systems Inc., the company allowing us our workspace, is located at 40201 Highway 190 East in Slidell, LA zip code 70461.
Personnel: Our team consists of thirty-eight students and twenty mentors all working alongside a teacher sponsor. The students range from grades nine through twelve and include many different personalities and skill sets. All of the students involved take on different tasks and work together throughout the year to operate as a successful robotics team.
Suppliers:
http://www.andymark.biz
http://banebots.com/
http://www.ni.com/labview/
http://www.wago.us/
http://www.8020.net/
Sponsorship Benefits
Team 1912 works hard to honor every sponsor. Their logo and name appear on all our products including robots, tee shirts, brochures, newsletters, and pit banners. Our website features and sponsor page with links to their home sites. In addition, the bottom of every page features their logo with links as well. Yearly we present each sponsor with a custom plaque and discuss our accomplishments.
Financial History and Plan
Over the last year, our team has received funding from several sponsors and used a majority of the funding while running our operations. NOTE: This data is available upon request.
Projected Balance Sheet: Over the next year, our team will continue to receive sponsorship from our current sponsors and will be receiving funding from new sources as well. This does not include sponsors whose amount of funding to be given to our club is yet to be determined or those that we are actively pursuing for financial support. NOTE: This data is available upon request
