About Us
We are A05 Annex, a seventh year FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team in Hood River, Oregon!
Our goal is to expand robotics to underserved students in our community.
Out of FIRST’s competitions (see “About FIRST® Inspires” below), FRC is representative of the real world and is more complex than the other levels. Every year, a new game is released. Teams of high-school students collaborate with coaches and mentors to design, build, and program a working robot for competition. In 2020, nearly 3,900 FRC teams competed from 34 countries.
Vince Ready and Jeff Blackman, our lead mentors, Blackman the founder of the HRVHS Robotics program encouraged us to start an FRC team in 2017. Our first year, we had 11 members--competing against teams with upwards 20 to 30 students--however, Mr. Blackman was confident of our abilities. We felt ready for the challenge. Despite our small team, we made it to FRC Worlds! Worlds is a week-long competition hosted in Houston for teams from all over the world. We made it to the semi-finals of our division.
Robotics is not just all about the robot. We develop skills in leadership, collaboration, and problem solving to grow our team into a well oiled machine. We learn invaluable lessons about fundraising, teamwork, and the effectiveness of duct tape. One of our lead mentors once compared our team to a business. As in a business, we must raise money in order to spend it and campaign for support of our endeavors. Every year we learn something new about how to better reach our community, manage our money, and communicate, while also learning about traditional robotics, physics, and programming.
Every year, our biggest goal is to make robotics accessible to everybody who wants to participate. For this reason, we don’t have a fee to join our team. We also have Unified Robotics. Created in 2019, Unified Robotics pairs FIRST team members with students with intellectual disabilities to increase equity within our robotics programs. It has been rewarding to see our community and FRC members support these students as they participate in an event that was only a dream two years ago. Unified Robotics
Our outreach projects also include the STEM Bus which is a mobile fabrication laboratory (“FAB LAB”) that provides STEM access to elementary aged students. This has been a significant undertaking, both and financially. Without our sponsors, we would simply not be able to bring this level of creativity, innovation, and teamwork to our community. THANK YOU!
About Our Name
A05 is the classroom for the robotics curriculum at Hood River Valley High School. Members of the robotics class wanted to create an FRC team, however our biggest issue quickly became space to build robots. Sharing a small classroom with multiple FTC teams just wasn't feasible. Our FRC team found an over-looked, glorified closet in the corner of the school, in complete disrepair. Nobody laid claim, so we annexed it, cleaned it, and made it ours. This later inspired our team name.
In March of 2020, HRCSD remodeled the Career and Technical Education wing of our school, including our A05 classroom., including our A05 classroom, broke ground. This spring, the return to in-person school will also mark the entrance of students for the first time into the new classroom. During the remodel, our classroom was renamed A12, but thanks to a determined effort from our teacher and team, the placard labeling the classroom as A12 was replaced. The classroom will remain as A05, and so will our team name!
About FIRST® Inspires
For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) is an international youth non-profit organization that operates the FIRST Robotics Competition. FIRST is dedicated to inspiring young people’s interest and participation in science and technology. Their programs provide a one-of-a-kind learning experience for students around the world. The four competitive leagues are FIRST LEGO League Jr. (FLL Jr.), FIRST LEGO League (FLL), FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC), and FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC).