Port: "Off"-Season

It's been a while, and many things have happened over the past number of months. For better or for worse, the team members never seemed to turn off. Time was spent practicing CAD, learning about machining, spreading FIRST and STEM to our community, visiting our FIRST family across the globe, and tackling three off-season competitions.
The late summer has also been a somewhat interesting time for the team - summer training, off-season competitions, local outreach programs, lab cleaning, and international travel all occurred during a time when our head coach was mostly unavailable. The strength of our leadership students and mentors helped pull the team through a period of tough communication, without dropping any plans or events. I'm most impressed that none of this commitment was forced (outside of drive team practice, more on that later), and yet this year we saw the highest attendance for summer training. So far, I think the growth in knowledge and attitude really shows. PNW 2019 - you've been warned. We're hungry. And we like super hot spicy wings. -Er- Thai food.

Port: Fun In the Sun

Summer is here! We're finally, hopefully, all rested and recovered from the past season of build and competition. With our inspiration set and goals written, our summer training is in full swing. Our new team leadership has been meeting about the direction of the team, recruiting new members, and driving our summer events. Secretly, mentors have also been having a great time, meeting up with other PNW mentors at a potluck hosted by FIRSTWA, and keeping up with our alum and their internships, college graduations and jobs (don't tell the kids though, they aren't supposed to know that old people do fun things).

Port: The Drive to 2019

"So what are you guys going to do tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow we start the 2019 season."

A parent and I were chatting while tearing down the tables and chairs from our end-of-year banquet. In reality, we have already had a few meetings that looked forward to 2019 - retrospectives on what went well and where to improve from 2018, suggestions for recruiting, summer outreach and training, and general housekeeping. Or, literal house-keeping.

Port: Looking Back on Houston

So who are the 4911 CyberKnights?

I wanted to take some time and introduce the 4911 CyberKnights, a 5th year FRC team from Seattle, Washington.

Hello, World

The Start

We all have to start somewhere. Here's an intro.

Just like a team getting a new shop, my writings, musings, postings, and general random thoughts have a new string of 1's and 0's to hide behind. My clever plan is to port all of my existing posts from the CyberKnights website blog to here, and hope nobody notices. The why is actually simple - the team uses the blog space for student creation, sharing updates with families and sponsors, and giving our writing team students a sandbox in which to exercise their creativity. My purpose for writing is much simpler and much less organized: I saw JVN start posting, and decided to copy him.