About Us

The In Gear Robotics Project aims to provide the experiences that we, 26603, have had with competitive robotics. It an extension of our ideas, values, and beliefs—it’s the message that we want to send to the world. As we move in to the final stages of our K-12 educational career, we’ve had to consider the legacy of our team and what kind of imprint we want to leave behind. Will we stay involved post graduation? Should we leave behind anything? 

We don’t have answers for these often difficult questions, but we can take steps into trying to figure out what we want. That’s what In Gear Robotics is all about—a chance for us to learn about what we want from ourselves, and a chance for people who’ve been interested in robotics to actually participate in robotics. 

Personally, I believe that participating in robotics and being a member of a robotics team are two different things. To participate is to just be there, on your own. It’s to spend long nights piecing together Arduino servos and 3-D printed filament clusters, or hunting that one tiny bug on Arduino IDE. It’s to be invested in robotics as a discipline of engineering as a whole (and yes, this includes computer science). This has it’s own rewards, and I encourage anyone going into engineering in the future to get a feel for it through their own projects. 

To be a member of a robotics team, however, is a different story. It’s to spend hours under harsh sun, confined by humidity, selling broken cookies like a door-to-door salesman. It’s to do forced sleepovers to bring a half-functioning robot to the first meet and eat taco-bell at 4 AM. And yes, of course, robotics is there, but there’s more to it beyond robotics. 

Hopefully, dear reader, you understand the kind of experience we want to provide for those interested in the world of competitive robotics.