It's early December 1997 and a group of about 10 high school students meet at Mills High School Student Eric Park's house. These students aren't meeting for a mere school project but are there to begin the planning of their school's entry to the FIRST Robotics competition. Much discussion occurs over the subjects of funding, recruitment, and getting the schools support. The next day an after school meeting was held at Mills High School, about 30 students attended to learn about the FIRST Competition and how The Mills High School Robotics team will go about entering the contest. Eric Park, Gilbert Lip, Billy Allan, and Francis Hahn who had attended an orientation meeting for the FIRST competition at the NASA Ames facility led the presentation and showed a video that they had borrowed from the Gunn High School Robotics Team. At the end of the presentation a signup sheet was passed around on which everyone who had seen the presentation signed their name.
With an enthusiastic team ready the team went to the School to get their support which they quickly received after talking to the school's principal. The team met again at Eric Park's house on December 21, 1997 to get general overview of the contest, do a run-through of the financial presentation, find people with connections at companies who could sponsor them, decide on the team's hierarchy, and to decide on a team name and logo. All of the members of the team attended this meeting and discussed the issues. The team chose the name Themis for itself; Themis is the Greek god of Physical Phenomena and was chosen because of the high proportion of team members in a Physics class at the time. The logo chosen was a logo submitted by Brian Chan which showed a three dimensional scene with the team's name in the center. Now with a team and a supportive school behind them the team now came to the hardest part of all the problem of getting funding and sponsorship. In previous years teams from other high schools have gotten many tens of thousands of dollars from their sponsors such as Gunn High School who received over $40,000 from their sponsors Xerox PARC and NASA Ames. The team needed to raise $4,000 dollars by January 9, 1998 to just enter the contest, which doesn't even include the money, needed to buy parts for the robot. Quickly a letter asking for sponsorship was drafted copies of the letter were given to all the team members in hopes of some of them being able to get a corporation to sponsor the team.
Then on December 28, 1997 a meeting of the team's appointed leaders at that time occurred at Eric Park's house to discuss Expenses such as transportation costs, food, parts for the robot, and the entry fee. They needed to call the teachers to set up a faculty meeting by January 5, 1998 to get support for a project that would cause many of the team members to get behind in their school work. Even with the teacher meeting they still needed to get to a meeting at Lockheed Martin on January 5, 1998 for more information about the competition. With the deadline for the entry fee rapidly approaching the team had to call the Mills Planing Council to set up a time for a presentation on January 7,1998 to seek funding from them. The script they were going to use for their presentations to companies and the Mills Planing Council (MPC) to solicit funding was still uncompleted as January ninth quickly approached.
On the morning of January 9, 1998 the team only had a meager $100 in its coffers the team was racing to get money from anywhere they could. A presentation to Mills Associated Student Body Council netted the team $3,000 but that still left them $900 to get for the entry fee to FIRST. As the day progressed the team began to have fears that the team couldn't get the money for the entry fee in time and would be knocked out of the contest before they really started. But as the school day ended they were happily greeted with the news that they had received the sum of $4,000 dollars from the MPC, which gave them enough to pay for the entry fee and start on the funds they would use to build it.
With the entry fee in the task of getting money to build the robot and to send a group to Florida for the competition began in earnest. Any company that had even the remotest possibility of agreeing to sponsor the team was contacted. After much soliciting by the team's finance group was able to receive $1,000 dollars from ProActive Sports, $7,500 from Fairchild Semiconductor, and $600 from the Stanford Engineering Association for the team. With $12,200 dollars left in the team's pockets after paying the entry fee the team was ready to build a robot. Even though the team still sent out letters for funding they were unable to get any more money.
Now planning began on the robot itself. A meeting was held in Mr. Philips room to decide on the priorities of the robot and what strategies should be used. The FIRST Competitions challenge this year was to place balls on a tilted ladder, the higher the ball was placed the more points would be awarded up to a limit of three points per ball. In addition to placing the balls on the ladder balls could be placed in a hexagonal upright tube, balls placed in the tube would double the points they had received from the balls on the ladders. In each round three teams competed to have their robot and one human player place their teams nine balls in a way to get the most points and prevent the other teams from doing the same. In addition to the human player, two people controlled the robot and another coached the whole operation around the paying field for their team. Brian Chan and Jason Wong went about designing the robot using sketches and AutoCAD Drawings to guide the building of the robot. They used a plotter they had borrowed from the tech draw department to rapidly get blueprints of the robots parts to the metal shop for construction.
In February two boxes containing parts arrived at Mills High School. These parts plus some specially ordered parts would be used to make the robot that would compete in the FIRST Competition. A series of long nights started from the first day the parts arrived and didn't end until the day the robot was turned in. Routinely Students from team Themis could be found at the school's metal shop at one in the morning working on pieces of the robot. As March and the day to turn in the robot approached the team spent longer and longer hours at school. Staying at the school till two or three in the morning was common and some even stayed the whole night without going home. In many of the team member's classes you could see them grabbing a quick nap and if caught would respond with an excuse of one word, "robot". The schools twenty-minute reading break was renamed nap time by team because of the way the whole team no matter which class they had would just drop off to sleep. As the final week of construction before the robot was to be turned in arrived the building went into super hi gear. Billy Allan was reported to have gone without sleep for the four days before the robot was shipped off. The food that the team "enjoyed" during this time would have turned anyone's stomach if they weren't desperate for food. Meals that consisted of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, nacho flavored chips, dehydrated Ramen noodles, and the occasional McDouble with fries were always topped off with nice warm glass of Surge soda. For days they lived on caffeine and dehydrated noodles alone.
On the day the robot was to be shipped work was frantic as pieces of the robot were welded or screwed in place. Because of the weight limit of 130 pounds the call went out to "Swiss cheese it" or drill holes in or cut off every piece that didn't have a function to reduce weight. A crate was readied the night before to ship the robot to Florida and as the 5 o'clock deadline approached the team decided to pack up the robot and finish any leftover work in Florida. The robot and all the tools that would be needed in Florida were hastily packed in the watertight create. The robot was put on Josh Klotovich's truck at about 3 o'clock so it could be driven to Gunn High School, which was thought to be the place to turn in the robot. When the robot arrived at Gunn no place could be found to turn in the robot. The team waited there until a call to one of the organizers let them know that the real place to turn in the robot was actually San Francisco Airport. Josh and Steve Lansing's father quickly drove to the Airport where they were able to get the robot in with only two minutes to spare.
Now with the robot away the animation group of Brain Chan, Anthony Lee, Jason Wong, Angela Tiao, Billy Allan, and Ronny Chatterjee began work on the short computer animated film they would enter in a side competition of the robotics contest. Brain Chan, Anthony Lee, and Jason Wong would make the three-dimensional models, Angela Tiao and Billy Allan would write and play the background music, and Ronny Chatterjee made sure that the animation group had the resources they needed to be able to render such a detailed presentation. After many hours of work that lasted until five in the morning the animation was finally finished on the day it was to be turned in.
After all this work the team finally readied themselves for their trip to Florida on April 1, 1998. All the students that were going had paid about $300 to go to Florida for the team. They would be staying in Florida until April 6, 1998, which coincides with the schools spring vacation so that the students who compete don't miss too much school. The day before the trip an itinerary of the trip was passed out to the team. They would stop in Denver on the way there and stop in Los Angeles on the way back on their flights with United. The only problem was that the flight left at 5:30am from Oakland Airport and the team would have to meet at 4:00am so they could go there together. On the Morning of April 1, 1998 Ronny Chatterjee awoke at 3:45am to find that his alarm had stopped working, suddenly realizing that he only had 15 minutes to get to school where he was going to meet the rest of the team. Luckily he had packed his bags the night before so all he had to do was get dressed and get out of the house with a cereal bar in hand. As he raced to Mills he feared that they had left without him but he arrived just in time to flag them down. Quickly he took his bags out of his dad's car and threw them into Brandon Gee's mother's Suburban right before he threw himself in as they pulled away from the school on their way to Oakland Airport.
At the Airport everyone was quickly processed as Teacher Bob Williams led the team through check-in. They were soon on the plane as it began its trip to Denver. At Denver there would be a one-hour layover during which they could quickly get lunch before they continued on to Florida. When they arrived in Florida they had a bus waiting for them which took them to Walt Disney World's Caribbean Beach Resort which was where they were staying and where they met up with physics teacher Art Fortgang. That night there was a quick orientation meeting where they found out where and when the buses to Epcot and the FIRST Competition would leave from. They found out that the buses would leave from in front of building Jamaica, which was the building they were staying in. That night they met a team from Oklahoma that was also staying at their hotel, they were the only team from that state.
The next morning team Themis quickly bought their breakfasts with the free food coupons they had received from FIRST the night before. They then proceeded to the bus that took them to the FIRST Competition. At the Competition they claimed their robot and their pit area and began working on their robot. That same day they were scheduled for three practice rounds on the playing field. At that time Ronny Chatterjee and Thinh Nguyen went around the pit area to look at all the other team's robots and document them on film with a camcorder. With problems abounding with the robot the team went to try out their robot which failed to work at all except spin in place. With another hour of work on the robot the team went to their second practice round where the robot was able to move around but the ball lifting mechanism was only able to go up half way. Unruffled by the problems the team worked on the lifting mechanism and hoped for the best as they went into their third practice round in the Newton Theater. This time the robot worked better but it still couldn't lift the balls. At the end of the first day the team seemed a little worried as they went back to the hotel realizing that the next day the real competition would start. To relax a little before they went to sleep that night they all went to Downtown Disney which is the shopping area of Disney World. They visited the Virgin Megastore, Planet Hollywood, and the Blues Brother's café.
The next day work on the robot continued furiously as the seeding rounds began. They would have three chances to get as many points as possible to get a good seed. The first round they were only able to get second place largely due to the accuracy of Keith Sinclair who was the human player for team Themis. The second round the robot's lifting mechanism completely failed and all the robot could do was nudge the balls to Keith who made only a few of his shots in this round, as a result the team got last place in that round. The next and final round the lift was repaired enough to knock the other team's balls off the ladder and to bring balls to the human player. With the robot as ready as it had been the whole competition the team was able to get first place by knocking an opposing team's ball off the ladder at the last second. With a robot that hadn't worked correctly for the whole competition the team could do nothing except hope for a good seed.
The next day was the first day of the actual competition. There would a grand opening ceremony that day where all the organizers of FIRST would give short speeches. Ronny Chatterjee arrived in the Pit area that day expecting to see most of the team already at work on the robot. To his surprise and disappointment only a handful of team members were there feverishly trying to figure out a way to add the additional motor needed to make the lift work correctly. To make matters worse the team had been scheduled to be in the second round of competition that day in the big Einstein Theater. The team reluctantly wheeled their robot to the staging area as other team members who were there took their places among the crowd. The team was only able to get a dismal one point from that round. When the robot was back in the pit area the team was able to get the additional motor to work but they were still unable to fix the fuse problem, this would be the main reason why the robot failed work in the second and team Themis's final round. In that round they were only able to pick up a dismal two points. With only three points to their name team Themis was eliminated from the competition.
Most of the team then dispersed to go to the different theme parks in Disney World or back to the hotel to relax before the competition's award ceremony that night and the wrap party afterwards. At the awards team Themis did not win anything but the whole experience of building the robot was a reward in itself plus there was a party to go to at Epcot. The party had food everywhere and all the teams dancing to music from a DJ. After the party the team went home to get a good night's rest before they attacked the water and theme parks the next day before they went home the day after that. On Monday morning they took a flight to Los Angeles where they waited for three hours before they returned to Oakland from where they could start the boring part of spring vacation.
