Yorktown High School's FIRST Robotics Team

We are a group of 10 students at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia. We started a FIRST robotics team just this year— the Yorktown “Ocebots”! No one at our school had done this before. One of us convinced a great teacher, Ms. Farzinfard, to sign on as our faculty sponsor. The rest of us joined up and we dug in. We are fortunate to have a generous sponsor who helped fund our first two competitions. We knew we were up against much bigger, more experienced, and much better-funded teams.

Despite that, we've been doing great. We've won all three rookie awards in our first two competitions. At the end of the regular season on Sunday, March 26th, we found out that we were one of 60 teams to qualify for the Chesapeake Region's District Championships. We are the only rookie team that made it! As a rookie team, if we do well, we even have a pretty good shot at being invited to the worldwide championships in Houston, Texas next month. This is because one stand-out rookie team from the districts often gets selected to go to the world championships. This would be a thrilling opportunity for us to compete at that level, learn even more, and get noticed by the types of bigger sponsors like NASA, Boeing, Amazon, and others that support teams in our area.

That's the good news. The bad news is that we did not anticipate this and competing is expensive! We need some help to pay the competition registration fees. If we get to go to Houston, we've got to pay to transport the robot and our team. We are asking for $12,000. This would cover the registration cost of the upcoming District competition ($4k), and also the registration for the Houston championships ($4k), as well as travel & shipping expenses. Any funds we don’t use this year, like if we don’t get invited to Houston, will stay with the club and be used for supplies and next year's registration fees. We hope to build a team at Yorktown that will be here for years to come. It turns out, that takes a lot of fundraising! Thanks for your support.

Parents’ Note: Thanks for considering supporting the Yorktown Ocebots. We are all proud of the kids. It’s pretty amazing what they’ve been able to figure out on their own. Dr. Clark, our principal, is looking at funds he can allocate, but the students are right: there is a long way to go. If you are not yet a Yorktown parent, but you or your friends have techie kids headed to Yorktown in the future, consider donating now to help this crew build a foundation that future students can build on. As the kids said, they also need sponsors and mentors going forward. If you are a business owner or have opportunities from your employer to engage them about sponsorship, contact us using the link below so we can help with more information. If you are an engineer, the team could use hands-on mentors next year too.