teamthemis - we should start out by explaining our name. After about 45 minutes of looking up random words in the thesaurus and dictionary, we came across Themis. In Norse Mythology, Themis is the Goddess of Physical Phenomenon. And so it was - what better name to use for our team this bold and domineering title!

But that is skipping ahead. We started with four. Francis, Gilbert, and Billy heard about the competition through their friend Eric. "Why not?" he asked. It sounded like such an innocent project.

After school, on a relaxed Friday night, we went to our first meeting at Lockheed Martin. As it turned out, by the time we sat down and started listening to some of the other teams from different California High Schools talk, we knew that we were about to jump into a project bigger than the four of us had ever experienced or even seen. After viewing a video of the previous year's competition, and after seeing the amount of work, skill, dedication, coordination, Coca Cola, and stress that needed to be put into it . . . we couldn't stop talking about it for the next three hours.

About a month went by, and we had managed to con about 38 students into joining the team. There were a few sophomores, about half juniors, and around ten seniors. What kept us motivated was the sheer rush that came from knowing that we were about to spend two months of our lives trapped at school planning, designing, constructing our own robot - and these two months were right around the corner. Everyone was excited, but they didn't quite know what was about to commence. We didn't know what was about to commence. And then the deadlines started appearing.

The first deadline was the entry fee. $4,000 was supposed to be sent to the FIRST Foundation in about two weeks. We had nothing. Immediately following this profound realization, we scurried to create multimedia presentations, buy suits, and work on our speaking skills. We then scheduled a presentation for our school's Student Congress. With that money and money collected from other personal contacts, we were able to make the deadline. A few days late, but they accepted it. Fairchild Semiconductor ended up being our main sponsor about a month later. And then the next deadline showed up.

Another month rolled by and we realized that we needed to send someone to New Hampshire (We're in the Bay Area) to register us formally and pick up the containers of parts we needed. Through the powers that be, our principal just so happened to be planning to go to New Hampshire at that time. We got our parts.

And then along came January 10. The FIRST Competition was formally started. We downloaded the rule book off of the team area of the FIRST Foundation's web site - where all 200 US teams were told to look for it. It was just posted up on their page the night before. We started to look through it. It was over 200 pages long. We were in need of a faster printer.

A few days later, we started designing the robot. We held meetings at school, at people's houses, and anywhere else were we could fit 25 people at a time. At times our group was divided into 5 teams, each working on a general design of the robot, all completely different. After synthesizing our designs (it took about a week), we had a general idea of what we wanted to build.

Of course, the word 'design' in the technical field is often associated with CAD. So now we had to model our robot in AutoCAD. This is where we fell a little bit short. Only one and a half weeks out of our six week allowance had been used up, and we were already trying to build the robot. The designs were not finalized yet, but that was OK - we had 38 people hyped-up and ready to spend all hours of the night at our school's metal shop - we didn't need designs!

We were given two crates of parts, around 1000 parts total. There were no instructions. The only thing we knew was that we had at our disposal motors, gears, pneumatics, electronics, and various fasteners and components, as well as a catalogue of parts that we were allowed to order from.

Alas, we ran into troubles. The pieces didn't fit, the holes weren't drilled to spec, the angle iron wasn't cut to the right length, and our welding warped the frame. We realized that, among other problems, this was the direct result of not finalizing our design correctly. About 3 weeks into the process, we decided to model as much as we could on the computer. AutoCAD was simply not fast or simple enough for us to efficiently use. Rhino3D, a software program comparable to AutoCAD, was employed. The models created there were certainly giving more shape, definition, and concrete measure to the design, but it was too abstract. The solutions to our problems still had to come out of our heads and then directly into the metals shop. We just didn't have enough time to sit in front of the computer and model everything to make sure it worked. We just had to build it.

A valiant effort, indeed it was.

But, being the resourceful and ever-dedicated team that . . . we knew we had to be, we pulled through. The claw on our robot was designed by hand, built out of fiberglass, and controlled through an air piston attached to an accumulator, hooked up to our pump, wired to the controller board. The lift was built using fiberglass, metal rods, pulleys, spectra-cable, and a few motors here and there. The base was constructed out of angle iron, and on it went the wheels and motors, gliders, a motorized platform for the lift, the pneumatic systems, speed controllers, the controller board, 12v battery, an R-Net, and an assortment of colorful cables.

The last few nights of construction, we were running around from the physics room to the metals shop to the woods shop and back again. Five of us trying to solve this problem, and seven on that problem, and the remaining trying to re-design the structures that the problems were attached to - all knowing that the robot had to be shipped to Florida in three days.

But through hard work, a few skipped school days (though the days were spent entirely at our school's metal shop), 26 McDoubles per night, and many a cup of Surge, we got the robot packaged, and delivered to UPS. With two minutes to spare.

That was quite a trip in itself. A month and a half of planning, designing, constructing, troubleshooting, and re-designing was about to pay off at the Epcot Center. In Florida.

So, as April 2nd came to be, and after a few months of rest, relaxation, and reflection, it was time to compete at Walt Disney's Epcot Center. 21 of us, including two advisors, flew down to meet our robot. We spent a total of five fun and stress-filled days and nights planning, repairing, preparing, competing, partying, sleeping, staying up, more repairing, re-designing (yes, even in Florida we redid parts of our robot) and finally competing in the final matches. We didn't place that high. But that was no longer what mattered. In fact, for a lot of people that was the last thing on their minds.

What all of the sudden came into focus was the following year. We knew that there were quite a few things that went wrong, and we had an entire summertime to plan out and organize the ideas for the team. And here it is, August 6th. School starts at Mills High School on the 31st, and we've only got 3 months until the entire process starts over again.

An entire year has almost gone by since we first started the project. Memories of laugher, compromises, stress, glee, more stress, learning, and great times lay behind us. But there are plenty more of those right ahead, as we enter the FIRST Competition 1999.