So here we are in our fourth year. We've come so far and yet we have so far to go! Most of the original SRHS FIRST team students have grown up and moved on. Only two original members remain, and this year they will move on, too. Some of those "grown-ups" have come back to help the team, tutoring the new "children" in the ways of FIRST. We also have our two incredibly dedicated engineers that come back year after year and have been able to recruit three more this year. One of our former NCSU students has joined IBM and continues to be very active with our team!

As we grow older, we know that we must continue to grow and change. In keeping with our philosophy of focus on student involvement, we've reorganized the team. We have modeled our team after a venture capital business by splitting into 5 divisions that report to the Board of Directors. Our Board consists of the teacher-leaders and engineers. We have an "Operations," "Engineering," "Graphics," "Marketing," and "Parents" divisions. A student manager, who coordinates the activities of the others, leads each division. The divisions are responsible for all aspects of our team's efforts with every team member having a job description and therefore ownership in meeting the team's goals. At the first Board meeting, the student managers voted to form a parents division because they recognized the importance of the parents' participation and support. Each division has a project plan with assigned deadlines that aligns with the team's general project plan. In addition to weekly board meetings, periodically, the team managers must report to the sponsors on the status of the team's project plan.

Once again, we sponsored the NC State FLL Tournament. And yes, once again the weather has impacted our efforts! This time a major ice storm that knocked out power to over 2,000,000 people hit right before the weekend of the tournament! While we could have canceled it, we felt strongly that the FLL teams who had worked so hard should have their chance at competition too. So, instead of canceling, we rescheduled it. The only time that we could was the weekend of the FRC kickoff. This meant that we had to sacrifice watching the live kickoff or sending anyone to New Hampshire. We were happy to make such sacrifices because we believe that we continue to make strides at helping to spread the message of FIRST in NC through our participation in FLL. There were twice as many teams in the tournament this year and again SRHS student team members and former team members were responsible for the entire organization. The MC for the day was even a SRHS FIRST team alumnus. Our parents and other members of the school community supported us again. A special treat for us was that parents of former team members also returned to help, one even driving to Richmond on the day of the kickoff to pick up our kits. We are very grateful for the invaluable support of so many people. We reach out in other ways also as we have agreed to mentor other teams and we have made several presentations again this year as part of our continuing effort to recruit support and corporate sponsorship for FIRST in North Carolina. We are convinced that if we continue to strengthen the design and organization of our team, we will be better able to expand the participation of others throughout the state. As we did last year, we were able to obtain additional sponsorship for both our team and other North Carolina teams. We are especially grateful for the sponsorship of the Digiton Corporation and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Additionally, our ties to the school community are strengthened this year as FIRST becomes the foundation for the Engineering Career Focus Learning Community at our school.

Despite all of the challenges we encountered, we were able to win awards. Our robot won the Motorola Quality Award and the Delphi "Driving Tomorrow's Technology" Award. Our robot was considered inventive and original and despite its lack of success on the playing field we were very proud of our inventive design.