Team

Chantilly Robotics is exciting, challenging, exhilarating, demanding, stimulating, exhausting; in short, "the hardest fun ever"! Chantilly Robotics, Team 612, is made up of very intelligent and equally inquisitive students with a desire to invent and inspire. Our team includes students from twenty different Fairfax County high schools who attend Chantilly Academy for specialized classes in engineering; including Engineering Systems 1 & 2, Engineering Physics, Engineering Drawing, Architectural Drawing and Girls Exploring Engineering (an all-girls section of Engineering Systems 1.) For students, participation on the team is an invaluable gateway to real-world involvement in science and engineering disciplines. Not only does it enable students to explore and fuel their interest in robotics, but it promotes valuable knowledge through hands-on discovery and problem-solving. FIRST promotes "gracious professionalism" where members of different teams collaborate to achieve cooperation within the workplace and at competitions, and eventually the workplace.

The team's Annual Student Membership Costs are $200, and cover the cost of a team shirt and one Regional Competition. Additional fees will be required for additional FIRST Competitions. Students who wish to participate and are unable to meet student membership dues and related expenses should contact Marty Rothwell, Engineering Instructor, Chantilly Academy, at Martin.Rothwell@fcps.edu

The 2009-2010 Robotics Team consists of approximately over 50 students, from freshmen to seniors. Each year, students who knew nothing about engineering pass through Chantilly Robotics with mechanical, electrical, and programming, as well as business and management, skills. All of these ingenious and crazy individuals have regularly met and still meet everyday after school, on weekends, holidays, teacher workdays, and even snow days in order to craft obscure and unbelievable designs into works of engineered art. During these days, the students and adult mentors give their time, energy, sweat, and pizza money in order to ensure eligibility into the FIRST Regional and International Robotics Competition.

Many Chantilly Robotics team alumni are now attending our nation's top engineering schools including Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Today, our graduates are also represented in top engineering and technology organizations in Northern Virginia.

Through the FIRST robotics competition, gracious professionalism has been the main focus as a result to the natural atmosphere of this friendly competition that team 612 is more that happy to be a part of.