By Sammy Nagy

With the start of the second quarter, many extra-curricular activities have forgone their introductory periods and are in full swing. One such group, the Tempe Prep FIRST Robotics Club, has hit the ground running amidst a slew of changes and other challenges including a change in location and the loss of approximately half of the senior team.

The team has relocated from the Dischinger garage workplace to a full workshop, generously provided by the Walterscheid family. However this move hasn’t been without its own difficulties, such as the loss of tools and a change in general layout leading to some confusion.

The loss of many senior members to graduation and other activities also hit hard, but every cloud has a silver lining, and new students have filled every gap left open in their absence. One senior member, Kyle Pickard, is certain that these changes are only temporary setbacks and will be quite beneficial in the long run. “The new workshop gives us more space to work,” he said, “and allows everyone to stay connected instead of detached and spread out like last year.”

He is also optimistic that the new members will become experienced long before the competition commences. “As long as we use the next three months well, experience should not be an issue.”

Other benefits to using the new workshop include access to tools that were vastly beyond the team’s reach previously, such as welders and plasma cutters, that can potentially be used to reduce the time spent cutting aluminum and other materials by hand.

From the end of last year to the start of this one, the FRC team has saved itself from being dismantled, thus allowing for many others to fully experience the satisfaction of creating robots, the code to run them, and the designs to build them.