FIRST Tech Challenge Team #11525, Minerva's Mechanics is a fifth season team ready for a great season! Although we come from a small school, we have lots of interest in STEM activities. We hope our team sticks around for a long time.
"We aim to bring more STEM opportunities to rural Brunswick High School Community"
Our Team Dynamic
Our team consists of students from Brunswick High School who are passionate about STEM. Despite a limited number of upper level STEM classes and STEM extracurriculars, we still have many STEM lovers at Brunswick who are eager and willing to take on the challenge of building and programming a robot. Participating in FIRST Tech Challenge robotics has taught us that failing a thousand times is the key to success. In the end, we problem solve our way to a solution to solve each robotics challenge. It is through hard work and determination that we have learned how to build and program a robot!
Philosophy
Although having a successful robot is one of our goals, our most important goal is to expose each of our members to what STEM careers are like. Because we have only recently added one programming class to our school, and our high school has no engineering classes, this is one of the only ways students can get real experience building and programming robots. People who already think they want to do STEM careers can learn the basics, and it inspires kids who weren’t really thinking about engineering or STEM fields yet to want to do them.
Our History
Our team was founded in 2016 by then sophomores Emma Damazo and Rachel Beall. Both Emma and Rachel learned about FIRST and decided that Brunswick High School needed to have a First Tech Challenge Team. They got it approved and named it Minerva’s Mechanics after the Roman goddess of wisdom and intelligence. “I founded the team with Emma because I thought our school needed an avenue for kids to participate in STEM.” said Rachel when asked why she wanted to start the team.
One of our Rover Ruckus Qualifiers! 2018-2019 season: Rover Ruckus
One of our Skystones competitions! 2019-2020 season: Skystones
Our team at one of our competitions! 2017-2018 season: Relic Recovery
Our first year as a team at one of our competitions! 2016-2017 season: Velocity Vortex