Past projects 5
Laptop for Robot Coding and CAD
Funded Mar 25, 2025Thank you very much for helping our FRC team with programming and CAD! We truly appreciate the assistance. It will be so much easier to connect to the robot and the competition field without all the opaque nannyware that comes mandated on school-provided laptops. The Mechaspartans will have one more advantage thanks to you.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Roeder
This classroom project was brought to life by The DonorsChoose Community and 3 other donors.Help Us Build Our Robot, and Build Our Skills!
Funded Feb 12, 2023We had one of our best robotics seasons yet this year! Thank you so much for helping us build our robot more efficiently and with more precision. Thanks in part to the tools you helped us acquire, our robot was able to consistently place the cones and cubes on the highest level, including during autonomous mode. We arrived at competition pretty much ready to go, and we were able to make the minor changes we needed with more than enough time to get inspected and participate in all of our matches. I can't wait to see what kind of progress we can make next year, with more team members with experience to be able to guide the new ones!”
With gratitude,
Mr. Roeder
Tools So Nice, We Need Them Twice!
Funded Apr 7, 2022Again, thank you so much for your generous donations to our robotics team! We have started having pre-season meetings (FRC Build Season starts in early January), and yesterday we taught new team members the basics of using and organizing tools.
With an additional drill, we were able to more quickly give everyone a chance to try their hands at drilling and riveting metal. Having different blades for the bandsaw allowed me to demonstrate its use and let students try cutting with the band saw. And having a second Craftsman helps make it so much easier to keep track of our most-used tools, be able to access them quickly, and to put them away where they will be found without difficulty when they're needed again.
I can't wait for Build Season, and seeing the team start working with tools to prepare ahead of the season gives me a lot of hope for what we can achieve this year!”
With gratitude,
Mr. Roeder
This classroom project was brought to life by The DonorsChoose community & an Anonymous Partner and 6 other donors.Tool Upgrades to Improve the Robot Building Experience
Funded Feb 9, 2022We had an amazing FRC season, and your support definitely helped make that possible! Even given the fact that our students were mostly new to FRC, our returning students had, at most, one season under their belts, and that we ran into external issues such as supply chain holdups, we had our best performance yet! We ranked 15th out of the 41 teams at our regional, and we were the first alternates for the eliminations round.
The Craftsman tool chest that you generously gifted us with worked like a dream for transporting our supplies to competition and for making it much easier to access what we needed when we needed it. With the external time crunch issues we encountered, every little bit of time that instant access to tools gave us counted! The band saw has quickly become one of our favorite tools. It's both powerful and also easy to use, and the team members love being able to make cuts quickly and cleanly that used to take them forever to do by hand. And the push cart made it significantly easier and safer to transport the robot and other heavy supplies from place to place, which was especially helpful during the rapid-paced competition experience.
Our season may be over, but we're already making preparations for next season. We learned so much about the robot building process and about ourselves! Even in the off-season, we'll still be using these tools and supplies to train and practice for next year.
Thank you again so much for all of your help. The MechaSpartans are immensely grateful for how your assistance improved our FRC seasons, and will help us for seasons to come.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Roeder
Robot "Brain" to Help Expand Students' Brains
Funded Oct 15, 2018Thank you so very much for helping us acquire another roboRIO! It turned out to be extremely useful. At one point in our build, we were having technological troubles that could have been caused by the roboRIO, and being able to test with another one made a huge difference in the accuracy and speed of our troubleshooting.
Build season just ended, and we're so excited to compete in a few weeks! We have the most prepared robot this year of all the three years we've competed, and not losing time to roboRIO issues had a significant hand in making that happen.
Our next step is seeing how our robot actually performs in our FRC regional! We're optimistic about our chances, and regardless of how we perform, we're looking forward to what we can learn from the experience.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Roeder