botblog

We're on Boing Boing!

A big thanks to Cory over at Boing Boing for posting a story and a link to us! And greets to those visiting from Boingboing.

Web Donations Break $2K

What a weekend! If this keeps up, we might actually make it !! Thank you!

Web Donations Break $1K

Your donations have just exceeded $1,000...Thank you all so much for your support!

Golden Gate Robot Mania

Our Website has a new look! Check it out at www.goldengaterobotics.org

Tax ID Number

For those who need it, our tax ID number is 94 332 7053.

Boilermakers on Primetime

The Boilermakers were on KRON 4 last night. We're hoping this is going to bring in more donations. Right now, we have less than a tenth of the money needed. If you have any lists you can help spread the word with, we're down to the wire here. KRON 4 has a nice piece. Check it out.

Frequent Flyer Miles

We've had a suggestion that we ask for your frequent flyer miles. Sounds like a good idea. Of course, we all have to travel on the same flight. Since Delta has the most flights to Atlanta, can we request Delta or Delta partner miles? I'm told this is the way to do it.

Apply for a partnership with a frequent flyer program
Inform your donor base that you are seeking award
tickets

Secure pledges of enough miles from individual donors
to get an award ticket (about 25,000 miles for a
domestic round trip on most airlines)

Determine the name of the recipient

Go back to the donor and have him or her arrange the
ticket under the recipient's name

Provide the ticket to the recipient

Feel free to email me with questions or miles!

Real world budgets are different than school budgets.

While the Boilermakers stayed in the Thriftlodge in Portland, we ate bagels for breakfast and pbjs for lunch every day. My real world friend Sarah, who has done a lot of fund raising, says that $15 a day is not enough to feed each kid. Students were allowed to pay for menu items above the $5 allowance for their own evening meals. Some did. Some did not. While I didn't mind having the cafeteria in my hotel room and packing the pbjs every morning to take to the team, I wouldn't complain if we had enough money to buy sandwiches at the deli or order pizza. It would be nice to not have to take that giant suitcase filled with the costco boxes of juice and creamcheese cups.

We walked the mile or so from our hotel to the arena in Portland. It was a bit of a blow to find out that we couldn't get public transportation to the airport at 4:00 AM, though. Yet to be seen if we'll have enough money to reimburse the teachers for the 4 cabs we had to call to get to the airport coming home. We're hoping that we can schedule things so that we can make use of the hotel shuttle from and to the airport in Atlanta.

She's also probably right about the fact that with our tight deadline, we aren't going to get the airline tickets at the price we found on Cheaptickets last week. She also rightly reminds me that we'll need to insure the bot when we ship it. The inital registration covered three shipments with FedEx. We'll have to pay from San Jose to Atlanta and then to bring GGBOT home. I had not considered the cost of insuring her.

Nate has already put the hotel rooms on his credit card. Those will be $64/night, but we didn't add tax to the budget.

So, $10,000 was the budget I came up with. Sarah says it's more like $16,000. Check out her spreadsheet and see what you think. Teachers have become used to doing everything on a shoe string. But wouldn't it be nice if schools could treat teachers and students a bit more like the real world treats employees?

Help the Boilermakers go to the Nationals!

March 4th-6th, John O'Connell's Boilermakers Robotics Team competed against 36 schools from around the Northwestern US in the USFIRST competition in Portland OR. (see USFIRST.org for more info on the competition). With the strongest and best-designed robot, great team strategy, a powerful basket shooter who never misses, and a highly precise automated program, our team was hard to beat. We were first round pick in the finals, outdoing teams with decades of more experience and quadruple our budget.

Next we go to San Jose for another regional competition on April 1-3, where we will further hone our skills and develop new game strategies. We now qualify for the finals in Atlanta, GA in April. But, can we raise the $10K needed to go? We really need community support in the next couple of weeks to raise the $4000 registration fee and the money to fly students to Atlanta for the three day competition.

We're putting out a call for donations and support. We could use help getting our message in the local media. We have lots of photos and film to advertise our success. We have messages from the students. We have two teachers who have volunteered all the time and energy to make this happen. We have mentors from CCSF, Northface and the surrounding community. We have received grants and donations from NASA, Best Buy, the Columbia Lodge Masons, Associated General Contractors of California, and Babylon Burning Tee-shirts. SFUSD board member Eric Mar and High School Administrator Frank Tom gave us a big helping hand in getting our trip approved. Jeffrey McManus of eBay is helping us with this blog. Thanks to him, you can make donations with PayPal. But best of all, we have future engineers, programmers, builders and team workers who have gained an invaluable experience building, programming and competing with GGBOT!

Please help us bring these students to the finals for a lifetime experience in the fields of building, engineering, programming and “gracious professionalism”. Click here to donate to our team!

Boilermakers are the NW Regional Champs!

Following is an excerpt from Lidya's Chairman's Award Essay.

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The US FIRST program has given inner city students at John O’Connell HS an opportunity to spend time off of the streets designing, building, programming, and testing a robot. In addition they have learned to work on a project as team. US FIRST has allowed Engineers from San Francisco to mentor students and students to support each other on completing a project at a team.

A huge part of our success this year has been the role that the seniors on the team have played in mentoring the freshmen. All students are comfortable in sharing their design ideas with Engineers and other members of the team. The atmosphere that has been created around the team has been noticed by the school and community.

The Robot Team has impacted the school community by bringing recognition to our school for our strength in Technology and as a result the school spirit has been increased. We also brought recognition to the San Francisco Unified School District because we are the only team from the city involved. We are in the process of recruiting other schools to join FIRST for the 2005 season.

City College of San Francisco (CCSF) is already a school partner through our Middle College High School (MCHS) program. The robotics team has strengthened and solidified the partnership between the teachers and students here at O’C and the machine shop teachers at CCSF.

John O’Connell High School is an under funded inner city school. Where 95% of the students are non-white and 34% of the students are on lunch support. Despite of these challenges we have successfully completed building our robot.