After having been involved for the first four years, we, Emma, Tom, and Becky, thought it important to document the things Team 1987 faced, overcame, and accomplished. Because we were at every meeting, volunteer event, presentation, build day, or competition event, we believe that our memories, combined with all the wonderful photographs taken by Lisa Smith (and others) should be shared. We chose to do so by writing this book.

It has 118 pages with around 520 photographs and it highlights each build season and the subsequent competition events. Also included are all the submitted documents that took us to the Championship in Atlanta three years in a row.

This book tells the story of what it takes to be a humble and very successful FIRST® team.

We did a bulk order through emails already. If you responded/paid, we have accounted for your order. So far, we ordered 24 books which should be here in a few weeks. If you didn’t respond to us and would like to buy one, you can buy one online. Here is the Blurb bookstore preview and order website: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/invited/1030061/3d956800543b3f2a9fb4bf27e5daf8a8

We are very excited to finally publish this book. We have been working on it for many weeks. Going through pictures to choose the perfect shots as well as following our progress in words took hundreds of hours, and we feel it is a great representation of Team 1987’s first four years. If there are any questions about the book, please email: thand@kc.rr.com.

We hope you enjoy it. To see the first 15 pages of the book, go to the link above.

This is my last work as a Broncobot. It has been an honor since the start!!

Can you believe it?! The Kick Off for the 2010 season is hours away!! Saturday, January 9th, 2010, we are having a Broncobots kick off in the lecture hall. Because of the snow days on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, we had to cancel our community pancake breakfast But still, we get the game tomorrow and we are PUMPED!

Soooo…..I’ve not blogged many events…and the worst possible thing happened over break. I’ll start with the weather, which has been insane!! It has been impossible to get to our buildsite unless you have a 4 wheel drive vehicle.

Shane, Cameron, and I were going to the site in Shane’s family suv, and we got pushed off the road by a snow plow. We were stuck in a ditch of snow and so we pushed it out. Then later that same day, we had to rescue alumni Dylan who’s car slid off the road into a ditch down the street from the build site. Shane gallantly pulled Dylan’s car out.

Here is some of the water for the rug doctor graciously donated by Hy-Vee. Our new member Stephen rug doctored the rooms.

We have a little organizing to do…

Build site cleaning last year: http://www.teambroncobots.com/wordpress/?p=146
A little different weather than last year, huh!!

Here’s where the story takes an unfortunate turn.
Here is Shane attempting to ‘network’ my laptop to the new network at the build site so I can print to the printer without plugging in.

Shortly after this, I froze my computer up, and restarted. But instead of starting, I got the blue screen of death. Impassable, we were stuck. I’m just going to summarize the rest of the story, it’s too traumatic to tell.
My laptop harddrive crashed with corrupted files, nothing was saved. Unfortunately (and semi-fortunately), I had moved many files to my external harddrive that I didn’t need on my laptop. That means I did not have the files I used backed up. The past seasons pictures were on the external, as well as robotics and camps and many robotics files. Sadly, I lost many family and personal pictures from the past three years. Shane helped me allllllllllll day we were at the build site to try and save my files, but it was impossible. He ended up dumping my whole drive and we started fresh. Sooo…. I had a new 09-10 season folder going with the events pictures we have been doing (many I haven’t blogged about yet). —> They’re gone. I’m trying to think of everything I lost. But anyway, that is okay!! Life moves on!! Let’s get rolling to some more pictures!

Here are some pictures from a Honeywell Mentor presentation I attended recently. I got to talk with my buddy, David Feather. Our mentor Tom and our sister team 1730’s mentor Rex put on a well planned presentation!

Wow. What a cute facial expression I have… Don’t let that ruin the picture for you! This is Michael B, he put together a hugely successful program to teach programming for area mentors and teams.

The President of the KCP Tony! What a nice guy, we are lucky to have Tony as a support of FIRST!

A video I made from pictures taken at the KC Regional was also played, I think I lost it but I might find it somewhere on the external someday to post!

Anyway, recently, we also adopted a local family with 7 children. Our team came together to buy gifts for each child. What a nice way to help out at Christmas time! Mr. R took a picture of the presents…I will have to ask him for a copy of that again!

The game unveiling happens tomorrow, watch Nasa channel to see it!

Watch the Mentor Invitation Commercial Here: http://www.kcfirst.org/Mentors.html

Recognize anyone?

On November 7th, the Broncobots competed in the 2nd Annual CowTown ThrowDown sponsored by Cerner and Team Driven where we went undefeated in the qualifying matches and landed the number one seed. We were head of the first alliance with Team 16, Bomb Squad from Mountain Home, Arkansas, and Team 2353, The Legion from Pembroke Hill School. After some very difficult matches, our alliance won the CowTown ThrowDown, losing only one match in the quarterfinal. Thank you to Team 16 and Team 2353 for being such great alliance partners!

We also had some volunteers at the event. Emma, Ken, my dad, and I all scored, while Denise and Scott worked on queuing and on the field. Annnddd M. Stephenson was with on Saturday!! This was the first time he was able to see us compete, so it was a pretty fun time!! Huge thanks to Lisa for the excellent pictures!!

Awwwwww!!!!

as

VERY excited

Sunset over Missouri River

To view all the pictures go TO THE PHOTOBUCKET ALBUM HERE

This afternoon we went to a Cerner Employee Social. Our friends from Team Driven and the TigerBytes were also there.

After the Cerner event, Cameron, Shane, my dad, and Mrs. G went to a carnival where Mr. R met us.

We have a few exciting things coming up! The seasons coming fast!