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Grandpa is awesome! He is a retired engineer and is at all of our meetings. He has great ideas and tells a few to us so we can do them in our way and combine a bunch of them into one robot. He helps us troubleshoot a lot. He asks us questions before he leaves and we have to think about them all week until he comes back. When he needed to feed his cat exact amounts, he decided that he should make a giant cat feeder that takes up one of his walls (and works really well)! Now, he can go without worrying about feeding his cats for about 3 days! Now, that's impressive!

Dad
Grandpa

The man, the legend, the papa! Don't get used to this image though, most of the time he has a beard! Our dad is funny and hardworking. He is a ship captain, so sometimes he's gone for awhile, but when he's home, he helps a lot and he's fun. He helps out at the Oppe Robotics Club, too, and always cheers us on at the competitions. If he is on his ship when we have a competition, he wears our team shirt that day. 

Mentors

Our mentors include Grandpa, Mom, Dad, Marshal, Mrs. Guajardo, Mr. Massey, and Charlie, Daniel, Harold A, and Maxx Wilson.

I first met Maxx in the High School robot room when I was visiting Marshal. He talked to me a bunch about robots and he's cool. He really listens to my ideas and helps me figure out how to bring them to reality. We became friends. He has been doing robotics for 8 years, so he's really skilled and has had lots of practice. He gave me good advice about my robot. We joke together. Maxx asked me if I would join his team for Nationals and Worlds last year. I happily said yes.  I got to meet even more friends in the robotics world and I got to experience EDR. Maxx has friends from all over the world. I was sad for Maxx when he lost at Worlds. Maxx said it wasn't such a bad thing. Tears of passion are OK. Winning and losing aren't important. Then he bought me Dippin' Dots.

I met Daniel on the day we first got our super kit. He said it was the way to go. Harold, Charlie, and Daniel are friends of Maxx. They came to my school to teach the next generation, which I thought was pretty neat. I love to have such cool friends through VEX.   - Milo

Milo getting inspected for EDR. All we need to do is spray paint him rubber band color and add a cortex.

Maxx Wilson, Harold Abdul-Ahad, Daniel Walsh and Charlie Olsen

Mr. Massey

Mr. Massey is The Robotics coach at Ball. We have known him for a long time though, because he referees all the competitions. He is like Luke Skywalker, the Jedi Master, except he doesn't wield a lightsaber, he wields knowledge. 

Even though I'm not a high schooler, he still spends a lot of time with me and we are friends.

One of the most crucial things he helped us with last year was talking to us about the game, and how our robot was spending too much time  moving, and we should concentrate on moving less/scoring more and using more motors to move better. We take our robot to the High School, and he helped us figure out stuff when we got stuck, like on how to program a hard thing, or make the color sensor work. -Milo

"Marshal, fix your wiring!" Mr. Massey says to my brother. I love watching Marshal work on his robots.

The second reason why I started robotics. Maxx had done a presentation at Oppe when Marshal was a 4th grader and he saw Maxx's robot and said "I could do that." We have an Esther Morris in our family. 

So when Marshal was doing robotics, I wanted to do it too. 

He helps us all the time, mainly with the coding, and teaching us how to code. He goes to the competitions to cheer us on. He's bloody brilliant. For a big brother.     - Milo

Marshal
Mentors
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