As you may or may not know, SPIKE is a team that prides itself on its ability to make goals for itself, not just the board members or the mentors making them for them. Our Pizza of Success details our goals and objectives for the next 3 years, as well as our core values for the team. It can be easily remembered as a Chicken-Bacon-Ranch pizza, meaning Community-Business-Robot pizza.
The base of the pizza, or the Crust represents our strive for safety in the team. In fact, one of our first goals is to have no days lost to injury on the team. Having no students or mentors will ever be injured so much that they cannot come on the next day is something we yearn for.
Another part is the Mozzarella, which connects to all branches of the team and sticks it together, much like Marketing does. A key component of Marketing is spreading information about our team within the district. Our goals for the Community start with establishing a FTC team at our district middle school, Timberlane. Having a FTC team at the middle school is a valuable asset to have in order to better motivate students into potentially joining the team. Next, we want to submit a Chairman’s Application by 2020. Of course, being the most prestigious award at FIRST, we want to be prepared to submit the best application we can possibly create. Finally, by hosting our very own Make-a-thon, it gives us the ability to leave a lasting impact on the community.
Moving towards the Business aspect of things, obviously we want to end the year with a large sum in the bank. We are striving to have at least $15,000 or more by 6/19, the end of our fiscal year. We also are hoping to be able to bring 20 members to the World Championships and have their families only have to pay $200 or less.
As for marketing, we want to achieve an Imagery Award by 2020. Obviously, this award symbolizes our strive to improve and attention to detail and aesthetic. Finally, we have our goals for our robot itself. We are a robotics team, after all. A goal we’ve agreed for ourselves is to become an alliance captain at a competition. Being an alliance captain is both prestigious and well respected, both things we aspire to attain.
Much like how we pride ourselves on making goals, we also pride ourselves on being a team that is student-driven and for the most part, student built, led and designed. In fact, our goal for this year’s and future year’s robots is to have them 100% designed and fabricated by the students on our team. Finally, arguably the most obvious goal we want to undertake is to make it to the World Championships, whether it be from entrepreneurship or by competing. Overall, setting goals and pushing to be better by completing them is something we hope to do in the near future.
