Cooking with the Juggernauts,
Team #1:
The Recipe for a Successful Team
The incredible story of the Juggernauts begins before many of us knew what a team was made of.  Since 1997, creating just the right ingredients was definitely the challenge. The Juggernauts, representing our sponsors, the Chrysler Foundation, BAE Systems and Oakland Schools, have provided sustaining examples of what a team can do and should be. The Competitive Engineering class has been teaching students the principles of FIRST since 1999.  The Oakland County Competitive Robotic Association, founded in 2000, has provided evidence that it is not the size of the event but the dedication that encourages students to pursue a career in Technology.  For teams needing help to walk, we gave them their FIRST Steps and they are on their way. Road shows, mentoring of FLL and FRC teams, workshops, team building, community outreach and more have been on the resume of every Juggernaut. Through testing, sampling, trial and error, we have discovered a winning recipe that we feel is ready to show the world.  Listed below are the ingredients you need to create a successful team:
1 bunch of Students
1 bushel of Science and Technology
1 pound of Mentorship
1 quart of Gracious Professionalism
1 cup of Community Involvement
1 dash of Inspiration
1 Role Model Team  
 
To prepare this dish, you need something big enough and versatile enough to cook the varied group of ingredients.  For us, it’s our tech center. Not only does our school help prepare students with science and technology, but it fulfills students’ career preparation needs. OSTC-NE houses seven schools in one, including EET (Engineering and Emerging Technologies), Culinary Arts, Cosmetology, Transportation, Health Sciences, Construction, and BMMT (Business, Management, Marketing, and Technology).  To get the best flavors, you need to gather ingredients from as many sources as you can. At OSTC-NE, we don’t limit ourselves to the students in our city. OSTC-NE takes most students from nine different schools, but students from a total of 23 districts attend. Some of these students in the Engineering cluster are also members of other FIRST teams.  This fall, our school was featured on an episode of ABC’s “Nightline”, showing how we provide students in the community with an opportunity to learn technical skills. It just takes a dash of Inspiration to get our fires going.  Some inspiration is from the guidance we get from our Chrysler and General Motors Engineers.

The foundation of our robotics experience is 1 bushel of Science and Technology; the meat that defines any dish we make.  Many of our team members are enrolled at the Tech Campus and learn the fundamentals of engineering and manufacturing during the school day.  The activities required in designing and building robots are often a direct extension of what they do in their technical curriculum.
Other team members participate in an after-school Competitive Engineering enrichment course which is open to anyone, whether they attend the day school or not. It’s a year-round program that allows students to further pursue and understand engineering. Our Competitive Engineering course continues in the summer where students learn the basics of physics when applied to the engineering design and build process. By the end of last summer’s class, students were able to build a fully functional robot, based on FIRST’s 2008 Overdrive game. This class is offered to students from all over Oakland County, whether or not they are Juggernauts. We feel that everyone, even students from local teams, should have an equal opportunity to learn about science and technology, which creates an exciting, competitive league for the future. Many current team members were in this course, allowing our team, and others, year-round exposure to science and technology.

1 pound of Mentorship is added to make our good fortune go farther. Even during these hard economic times, our team has mentored numerous rookie FIRST teams over the years; in the most recent ones, we have mentored 14 FRC rookies, along with 2 FLL teams. To help these rookie teams, the Juggernauts provide helpful materials and assist in many other ways we feel will give them another leg up. These include:

• Our own “How-To” video about control systems, programming, and robot building
• An 84 page instructional guide called “How to Build a Robot”
• Running over 30 workshops for teams
• A CD that demonstrates numerous team building activities that we distribute to other FIRST teams at regional competitions.

One of the FLL teams went on to become State Champs this year.
The Juggernauts strive to take mentoring to a whole new level. With help from Chrysler and BAE Systems, we recently mentored 14 new FIRST teams in a program we call “FIRST Steps”. With FIRST Steps, we provided each team with $500 for financial assistance, robot materials, how-to guides and tech support via routine phone calls and emails. The Juggernauts visited a few of these mentored teams to answer questions, while a few teams visited us and toured our facility. Two teams even used our shop to fabricate their robot components.
The Oakland County Competitive Robotics Association, OCCRA, continues to be a large part of the Juggernauts’ year.  This fall robotics league is a good preparation for the FIRST season.  OCCRA shares many of the same values as FIRST and is a great opportunity for young teams to get started and experienced teams to continue honing their skills.  The competition format of OCCRA (having a group of local tournaments leading to a County Championship) is now being modeled by FIRST in Michigan.  The Juggernauts were instrumental in the formation of the league and getting our school district to support it.  Now the league is run as a consortium of teams from the county.  Team #1 members are involved in every aspect of the league and are crucial to its continuation.  Through OCCRA, many teams have been introduced to robotics and eventually made the leap to FIRST.  Just last year, we mentored 5 new FRC teams and helped them in their transition from OCCRA to FIRST.  At the end of the season, we put on an awards banquet where every member from each team is recognized among family and friends.  Each team also elects their own MVP who gets a medal, certificate and their picture and name in the county newspaper.

We wouldn’t be Juggernauts without 1 cup of Community Involvement. In the summer, our team participated in the 24-hour cancer awareness event, Relay For Life. Within 24-hours, the Juggernauts raised $1000 by giving robot driving lessons and selling robotic bugs. For many years, the Juggernauts have participated in the YES! Expo at Ford Field in Detroit.  At this event, local FIRST robotics teams set up the previous FIRST game and let attendees drive our robot and feel what it’s like to participate in robotics. Similar to the YES! Expo, our team had displays at the annual Woodward Dream Cruise and our Tech Campuses’ grand reopening event, where members of our community could learn about robotics and drive our robot.
            To inspire the next generation to pursue science and technology, our team visited schools around the area. On a reoccurring basis, the Juggernauts have visited Longfellow Elementary School on career day to give students an idea of an engineer’s work by having hands-on science demonstrations and showing our robot. To help local Boy Scout and Cub Scout troops gain their Scientist badge, we gave the scouts demonstrations of scientific principles, quizzed them and let them do the demos themselves until they knew the necessary information to receive the badge. This is something we expect to continue and plan on doing with other Cub Scout troops this FIRST season. Earlier this year, our team visited Clawson High School and gave them a presentation about FIRST robotics. This presentation convinced the school to form a robotics team and they are eager to participate in the upcoming FIRST season. Twice last year, the Juggernauts gave presentations at Wayne State University about the physics principles tied to robotics. For our first presentation in the fall, the Detroit Metropolitan Area Physics Teachers and their families came to celebrate their 50th anniversary while we informed them how physics in robotics can be applied to and taught in the classroom. Our second visit in the spring was directed towards local high school students to promote science and technology careers.
           
Finally, add 1 bunch of Juggernauts.  The students are what make the team the team. Each one adds a distinctive flavor to the dish. Our team is small which allows each student to have excellent opportunity to share ideas and to have a positive impact on the team.  Each student builds communication skills working with individuals and individualities they would not normally encounter.  The teams’ diversity in persons and personalities ensures that every cog will always have another to turn against.  As the students simmer in the heat of the competition season, their flavors really come out. And the result is an appetizing experience for all involved.