Good Morning, Bulldog Nation!
Our varsity robotics team has made AHS history by advancing to the World Championship for the first time in club history! Both Hotdawgs and Underdawgs competed against 36 teams from South Texas this past weekend. Though both teams made it out of qualifiers and into the playoff rounds, the Underdawgs fell in the fourth round alongside their alliance partner, Silver Mech Cats from United South. The Hotdawgs, allied with Mighty Hawks from Harmony School of Excellence, persevered all the way to the final round, where they went head-to-head with Soap Dispenser and Chaos from Cigarroa High School. Ultimately, we lost in the final matches, 0-2 as Cigarroa's teams proved to be the better alliance.
However, our road to Worlds did not end there. At the end of the day, we were awarded the coveted Inspire Award, which established us as the #1-ranked team in South Texas for this season.
What is the Inspire award?
This award is given to the team that best embodies the ‘challenge’ of the FIRST Tech Challenge program. The team that receives this award is a strong ambassador for FIRST programs and a role model FIRST team. This team is a top contender for many other judged awards and is a gracious competitor.
The Inspire Award winner is an inspiration to other teams, acting with Gracious Professionalism® both on and off the playing field. This team shares their experiences, enthusiasm and knowledge with other teams, sponsors, their community, and the judges. Working as a unit, this team will have shown success in performing the task of designing and building a robot.
With this, I finally achieved some of my long-standing goals of bringing a banner home for the school and getting my team to Worlds. The job is not done. We’ll continue working to put AHS, UISD, and Laredo on the map.
February 21, 2025 – Starbase Tour
Before Regionals: Taking full advantage of the fact that we were already going to be in the valley, we applied for a tour of SpaceX's Starbase spaceport in Boca Chica. The stars aligned, and with no launches scheduled that day, we were approved. We hadn’t done a tour since February 2022, when my current seniors were freshmen. Fun fact: to promote careers in space engineering, SpaceX only offers tours to philanthropic individuals and educational entities, hoping to spark an interest in one day becoming the engineers responsible for making human life multiplanetary.
Starbase is a secure facility with proprietary technology, so phone usage wasn’t allowed during the tour. This is the only picture we were permitted to take, in order to “keep their UFOs unidentified.”
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