Team History
2014-2015
2015-2016
2016-2017
2017-2018
2018-2019
2019-2020
2020-2021
2021-2022
2022-2023
2021-2022
We are ready for another great season! We have three return members from last year: Gabby, Lindsay, and Amy; all of them are juniors this year. We also have three new members: Frida, Amelia, and Natalie; with Frida going into her senior year and Amelia and Natalie going into there freshmen year. We have qualified for State during our first qualifier with the think award. We also won 1st inspire at our second qualifier and were finalist in two awards at State! We also had a great time doing more in-person outreach this year. Overall is was a great season and great to be back in-person!
2022-2023
This season we have four returning members; Amy, Gabby, Lindsay, and Natalie; and two new members; Glo and Isabel. We got off to a strong start for the season with our outreach and advanced to state from our first qualifier! We improved our robot game a lot in our second qualifier and can't wait for state!
2020-2021
This season started with four veterans: Amy, Gabby, Lizzy, and Kacee. They also recruited two sophomore: Ali and Lindsay. Because of the challenges with COVID we have had a hard time doing our normal outreach, so focus more on robot game at the beginning of the season. We won the think award and 2nd inspire in our first qualifier in early February. We won think again at our 2nd qualifiers a week later. We qualified for state in our first qualifier. After the qualifiers we started to do more design review and tried to get more outreach done. We also fully redesigned our robot for state. Unfortunately we did not get any awards at state but it was still an amazing experience.
This season started with four veterans: Sosna, Ruhama, Nikki, and Vernice. They recruited four freshmen from Valley Middle School of STEM: Amy, Gabby, Elizabeth, and Kacee. We focused mainly on robot design. We won the connect award at our first qualifier, early in November. Later in mid-December, we had our second qualifier. We were in the top four and ended up as the third-best team before elimination matches. We were alliance captains with Metalmorphosis and fellow Apple Valley team, Can of Beams. We sadly were eliminated in semi-finals. We won the connect award and second inspire. Then, at the state our alliance won division finals. And got to the final round out of the whole state. Luckily we made it to worlds on robot competition.
2019-2020
2018-2019
This is our first season without our founding members! With two veteran members and six rookies, this season has been a nonstop learning experience. Aiming to be more robot focused, we relied heavily on CAD to design our drive train and intaking mechanism. While our robot at the end of our season was not as advanced as we planned it to be, it had the clean stable foundation to make it successful; from autonomous to endgame. We participated in leagues again this season, using the shorter gameplay to better our robot designing. At our qualifier was advanced to state off of the Think award. Unfortunately, we did not advance to worlds this season, although we did get nominated for the Connect award.
2017-2018
For our last season, we added 5 new members on the team! We decided to take more of a focus on our robot design. We started that by designing our drive train using CAD before the game challenge was released. We made sure our drive train was sturdy laser cut the specifics of the drive train mechanisms. All did not have any experience with robotics and it was very fun to introduce them to our team and teach them all the skills to continue on the team. We tried leagues this year and we found it a fun experience that helped us show the rookies what competitions were like in a less competitive setting. It also helped us advance our robot, as we took a more robot centered stance this year. We made it to state with 2nd place
inspire from our league qualifier. At the Minnesota State Championship, we received 2nd place Think award which advanced us to Northern Super Regional. We had a very fun time at the last Northern Super Regional, and are going to miss the fun experience of that tournament. We, fortunately, advanced past Super Regional receiving second place Motivate onto the Northern World Championship. At the World Championship in Detroit, we were nominated for design and Innovate at Worlds. While also being a finalist for Compass and Think.
2016-2017
We started off our 3rd season with more amazing outreach! We did Arduino camps over the summer which generated a lot of interest in robotics in younger children. So we carried that through the summer, and once school started we did a bunch of outreach at schools fulfilling our mission statement. Once Velocity Vortex kickoff came around we started building Duchess Steel, the third robot in our career. We ended up receiving first Inspire at Burnsville qualifiers, and second Inspire at the Eagan qualifiers advancing us to state! Advanced past state on 3rd Inspire, and past super regionals on the second-place Think award. Somewhere through all that, we testified for congress on supporting robotics in DC!
2015-2016
Our first season ended after our state competition, and within two days we were back to outreach and robots. No longer a rookie team, we were determined to put our experience to good use. During our off-season (between build seasons), we went to dozens of outreach activities in order to fulfill our mission statement. Once the season rolled back around and the game challenge was released, we got back into the swing of things with our three meetings a week. While continuing our outreach, we also began to brainstorm, strategize, prototype, and build for our first competition of the season: the North Branch Qualifier in North Branch, Minnesota on December 13th, 2015. At the end of our first
competition, we ended up taking home the first place Inspire Award, the highest award an FTC team can win. We were also a part of a semifinalist alliance and were nominated for the Control, Motivate, PTC Design, Connect, and Think Awards. Ecstatic, we went home and immediately began planning for the next iteration of our robot. We had around a month between North Branch and Rochester, our next qualifying tournament on the January 17th, 2016. Spending many hours a week planning and implementing our new designs to our robot, we went into the Rochester tournament with a light attitude and a willingness to help any team we could. During the tournament, we did end up helping several teams, including the Duluth Krakens by loaning them our spare phone when theirs failed to work. Using our phone, they did very well the rest of the tournament and even made it into the final winning alliance, moving on to state. As for us, we too did very well, ending up as the fourth alliance captain. Unfortunately, we were knocked out in the semi-finals. We left the tournament very happy with the Second Inspire and Connect Awards, as well as having won the Compass award for our mentor, Nick Aarestad. We were also nominated for the Motivate and Think Awards. Soon after, we attended the Minnesota State FTC tournament on February 5th-6th in Bloomington, Minnesota at Jefferson High School. At the tournament, we placed 10th out of the 24 teams in our division and joined Robotic Adrenaline and the Bomb Squad in an alliance during quarter-finals. Our alliance unfortunately did not move on to finals in our division, but our spirits were lifted during the awards ceremony. In total, our team took home five trophies and awards. Connie won the Stratasys Engineering scholarship, and Emily was also announced as a finalist for the Dean’s List award (which immediately qualified her to move on the world competition). Our team was also nominated for several other awards, but we won the Promote Award for our short video talking about FIRST, the Think Award for our Engineering Notebook, and the Second Inspire award. These awards qualified us to move on to the North Super-Regionals competition on March 17th-19th in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. At the North Super Regional Competition, we were very excited to compete with teams we had never met before and meet new friends. We came in with the goal to be friendly to everyone and not get upset over anything. By the end of the tournament, we had achieved this goal and were awarded the 1st Place Connect for our community outreach. This award was a huge honor after spending hundreds of hours giving back to the community and spreading the word of STEM. As a team, it was our goal at the start of the season to compete at the World Championship in St. Louis, Missouri. After having achieved this goal, it is now our goal to have as much fun as possible at Worlds, meet as many teams as we can, and possibly be considered for an award. Worlds was held between the dates of April 27th to April 30th. At the end of it all, we walked away with the Connect Award, ending our second season together on a high note.
2014-2015
During the fall of September 2014, our team was created consisting of 7 members: Atalanta, Barbara, Connie, Cori, Emily, Kayla, and Lindsey. Many names were brought up during one of our first meetings but we all decided on naming ourselves the Iron Maidens, as we all liked the name. None of us had any experience with FIRST or robotics before, so to get a feel for the building, we built a ranger bot that we named Ranger Rick. We demonstrated Ranger Rick at our very first outreach activity, the Cedar Park STEM fair. After the STEM fair, we took apart the ranger bot and started building 'Madame Steel,' our main robot which we used for the competitions. Later into our rookie
season, two of our members left and the team then consisted of 5 members: Atalanta, Barbara, Connie, Cori, and Emily. For the next 3 months after, our team prepared for our first ever competition which took place on December 13, 2014, in Edina. Our team walked away with the Connect Award and advancing to state, as well as being a finalist for the motivate award. After being shocked at our advancement to state, our team prepped for the state tournament which took place in Prior Lake on February 21, 2015. During the 2 months between the Edina qualifier and the state tournament, our team built additions to the robot to be able to score more points for that year's challenge, The Cascade Effect. After a long day at state, our team did not qualify for the super regional but we were very excited and happy for all who did and we left being a finalist for the Connect Award. That was the end of our first season together.