FRC 8592 Newton2 was founded in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. When school facilities closed, our former school-based FTC team moved to Nova Labs, a local community makerspace that remained open and was located in Reston. This shift allowed us to launch a community-based FRC team open to all students across the region.
In the Beginning (2020-2021)
Our competitive rookie year took place entirely online. We built a robot ("Isaac"), participated in scrimmages, and completed community outreach—but due to COVID restrictions, we were unable to compete in-person at official FIRST events. Our team did compete in the Digital Animation competition and won!
Building Momentum (2021-2022)
Due to COVID, FIRST extended teams' Rookie status into this competitive season. This allowed us to experience a true Rookie experience as we went to our first competitions. At our first competitions, we were blown away at the speed at which we had to problem solve. Our first event started without having the right software on the robot. We missed our first several matches due to this problem!! We never went to competition again without having checked the FIRST software updates right a few nights before competition! During this season, we also had to move facilities since our sponsor, Nova Labs, moved from Reston to Fairfax. We worked in a partially moved-in space with no heat during the entire season!
Rookie Success: Our first full in-person season brought a major achievement. With our rookie robot Fluffy, we won Rookie of the Year at our second event and qualified for District Championships. We had less than two weeks to figure out how to fundraise enough money and to figure out the logistics of how to get our team and our robot to District Championships in southern Virginia.
Learning Our Processes (2022-2023)
Growing the Team: Our team of 12 dropped down to six after graduating our seniors. We began accepting new students, including members from Nova Labs Robotics FTC teams. We grew from six to 20 students over the summer, representing seven high schools plus home-schooled students. We went to outreach events and scrimmages to teach our new members about FIRST and our robots.
The coaches realized that the team had the potential to be very sustainable if processes were put in place to streamline all the components of functioning as a FIRST FRC team.
Merging with ILITE: Even as our own team had grown significantly, we were appraoched in November to merge with iLite (former 1885) due to their reorganization. Weeks before kickoff, we welcomed 9 students and 6 coaches to join our team. Together, we built a new, unified team identity, growing to 33 students by the 2023 build season.
Competitive successes: Our focus on team processes paid off significantly to build "Bruce," as we won multiple competitive awards, won first place at a competition, and competed at District Championships again. We eagerly accepted our first invitation to World Championships!
Meeting the Prime Minister: In June 2023, we were invited by FIRST Chesapeake to represent FRC during a visit by UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Our students demonstrated robot operations, discussed the engineering process, and represented FIRST, WPI, and DEKA by showcasing the XRP robot. This visit led to invitations of private tours at WPI, DEKA, Boston Dynamics, Draper, and MIT.
Sustaining Success (2023-2024)
Growing the Team: Our coaching structure changed this year, and we spent considerable amount of time building our team culture, our design skills, and our fabrication techniques. Once again, we graduated many seniors, and about 50% of our team was new this year. We taught everyone our processes and practiced these processes in the off-season by competing in our first Bunny Bots competition.
Competitive successes: Once again, we celebrated a successful competitive season, winning many competitive awards. Our robot, "Zenith," performed intermittently this year, though, and we struggled figuring out what was wrong. It wasn't until the last match at World Champsionship that we figured out that there was a mechanical defect in the motors we had bought for our swerve drives!!!! While our performance on the field this year was hit or miss due to those defective shafts, we celebrated being recognized for our engineering and team culture!
In the Groove (2024-2025)
While we were thrilled that our primary coaches stayed the same this year, we were disappointed that our team once again graduated almost 50% of our membership. We had more applicants than spaces, as students from all over the DMV were applying to join us, including our own FTC members wanting to change to FRC. We accepted 36 students and began to again train them on our processes, skills, and manufacturing techniques. As with previous years we taught all these new members about FRC and FIRST through scrimmages and outreach events.
Competitive successes: We had another exciting year as we competed with "Perry the Platypus." We had many successes on the field as this robot was one of our most accurate robot to date. Due to its accuracy and that it could do all the plays on the field, we once again made it to District Championships and World Championships. This time, though, our performance at World Championships was our best yet since the robot was incredibly mechanically stout.
Going Forward
We are a fast-growing, highly competitive, and community-driven robotics program. We are a team focused on high-level engineering and design, mentorship and leadership development, and inclusivity and access for students from across the Washington meregion. With strong partnerships, dedicated mentors, and a passionate community, we’re ready to take on new challenges together!