ABOUT US
Catlin Gabel’s Engineering program is among the largest extracurricular activities on campus, with around 20% of the student body participating. It’s also one of the most inclusive engineering programs around, with 50% of our team being non-male.
Many know us as a FIRST Robotics team, but we are also deeply involved with community engineering projects. In fact, we’ve earned over $60,000 in prizes for our projects over the years. And on the Robotics side, we frequently qualify for the world robotics competition in Houston, having gone 14 times.
On our team, adults don’t touch the robot or the keyboard. Our mentors from the Catlin Gabel faculty and local companies help us develop our skills and are available for questions and advice, but our competition robots and community projects are entirely student designed, built, and programmed.
While our team has done extremely well at robotics competitions and various other STEM contests over the years, that success is not due to a single-minded drive toward winning, but due to our team’s focus on building up a strong team year after year and using our collective expertise to build amazing robots and innovative community engineering projects. This extends even beyond our team, as we are known for helping other teams with their expertise, knowledge, and the occasional spare part.
Recognizing the need for learning and practice opportunities for our new members, we started two regional events, and currently run one of them. The first event we created was BunnyBots which is an easy, small scale, off-season competition to get new members the expertise they need before the main season. This is one of our key methods of training new members, and is part of our skills certification standards. The second event we created was Girls Generation, which is an off-season competition entirely for non-male team members to get experience in roles they may not otherwise get a chance to do, enabling them to work towards these roles in future seasons. These events have been the inspiration for other FRC teams across the country and many spinoffs of these events have been created.
