We, Team 2395, The Ninja Munkees as a team honor, recognize and implement FIRST in our everyday workshop life and community involvement by recognizing, and inspiring science and technology. Our team uses community outreach to expose those interested in robots to FIRST, and this FIRST exposure teaches students to use problem-solving in their everyday lives. We give this exposure in our local community, like by visiting schools, libraries, and other local venues. We use our uniqueness of being a 4-H group and being able to have the ability to have certain outreach that other public schools may not be able to have. With all the community outreach our team has done we have built a team, a family, that works are in the workshop every week to use the problem solving that FIRST has taught us and complete the task before us each and every year.

 

    Team 2395 fosters intellectual and personal growth in every way available to our team. Our coaches and mentor’s dedication to the team and their knowledge has helped advance our students in many ways. Their variety of backgrounds gives our students to learn about and prepare for their future. It helps our students learn more about electrical, mechanical, computer science, manufacturing, construction, and overall just robotics in general. Being able to work alongside these individuals give a unique environment of working and growth of knowledge because they have a direct source for the answer to their questions and problems. This has led our team to be able to analyze problems in a different almost more sophisticated light. To develop our skills of analyzation, programming, CAD use, and mechanical brainstorming/building; we have offseason workshops to help teach new and old students about these things so that our build season runs smoother. Also, this year to help Team 2395 run smoother we have started implementing 5-S to our workshop. We have a team of students to work on 5-Sing out workshop every day. This has helped our team immensely by have more organization and safety than ever before. The FIRST program itself fosters maturity, open-mindedness, patience, confidence, time management, and kindness. These things that FIRST fosters within student helps set students up for their futures.

 

    The Ninja Munkees love to ignite the FIRST spirit in all those around us, we increase interest in STEM at every opportunity. To do this Team 2395 loves to demonstrate our robot at many events, like The Science Museum of Oklahoma, the Choctaw Library, 4-H County Fair, The State Fair, and Choctaw High School. At the Oklahoma State Fair, we have won the blue ribbon for our robot since 2013. Our team also takes much pride in our S.O.S. (Sciencing on Saturday) program. S.O.S. is where we take the new generations of possible FIRST members and ignite the idea of STEM in their young minds. We bring science and engineering to life for these all-day events with hands-on activities such as force, friction, wind power, and Lego robotics. These workshops have left many students seeking an FLL team.  On many occasions, we have tried to start an FLL team. In 2012 we had a member of our team mentor our small FLL team, the Mini Munkees. This team may not have worked out the way we would have liked, but we actively try to start a team every year.   

 

    Team 2395 radiates passion, commitment, joy, inspiration, enthusiasm, and encouragement in our team involvement. This passion also shows up in our work in the workshop, demonstrations, our daily lives and at competitions with not only our team but other teams as well. Our enthusiasm of what we have the privilege to do every season has helped draw people to FIRST. Our passion for what we do shows at demonstrations by the ability to easily being able to answer questions by spectators. Many years we have taken students who were not necessarily excited to present, through encouragement and help from many members of our team we could help them through their nervousness of public speaking; this leads to a great presentation by these members. Parents are always eager to learn more about what we do. For years we have had members travel long distances for our meetings due to the lack of schools with teams in their area. Inspiration from our team has led to the formation of other teams such as Radioactive Robotics (Team 2765), LightSabers (Team 3660), and Jankoptamus (Team 3498).

 

    Our team, The Ninja Munkees, loves to help and support others teams. We eagerly offer manpower, parts, tools, advice, and encouragement to other teams. An example of this is in 2013 Oklahoma City Regional, the rookie team (Dove Science) arrived with a half build robot. It lacked a way to score, bumpers, and failed to meet specifications in many ways. Without any kind of hesitation, several of our members jumped in to help. Our team was able to help Dove Science complete their robot and helped them pass inspection. Throughout that competition, we continued to help them improve their robot. In the past, for serval years we help rookie teams, on kick-off day, in a rapid-quick build. This year instead of helping with a rapid-quick build, we, Team 2395, invited the rookie team, Team 5578, to discuss battle strategies. We also helped them analyze and discuss the rules of the game with this year. At the end of the day, we simulated at the best of our abilities what a game match would be like with the robot designs that the two teams discussed. We’ve also had the great pleasure to mentor teams such as Radioactive Robotics (Team 2765), Mortal Combot (Team 2986), Robo Rockets (Team 4612), and Viking Robotics (Team 4349). Most importantly, we support each other. Our team thinks of each other as a family. Those aren’t just words when one of us has a trail or triumph the whole team is affected. One summer we had a student’s parent have surgery on their knee, and our team rallied around and offered to bring meals and pick up groceries for them. We had a family move away this season, this family had a large involvement in our team. We made sure to take a break from our hard work to show our appreciation for what they’ve done through a team dinner. Our team is small, so parents are largely involved, this helps strengthens our bonds as a team with one another. Our bonds as a team are important because when we have rough times we have each other, during or off-season.

   

    We couldn’t be a team if it were not for our generous sponsors. They give us the ability to function. Our major sponsor is what provides us with a place to work. Every year to show our gratitude to our sponsors by throwing them a sponsor dinner; where we thank our sponsors for everything they have provided us with. Our students personally write them letters to thank them. More than ever we appreciate our coaches and mentors, our dedicated coaches and mentors take time out of their lives so we have this ability to build not only robots but ourselves. Many students who have graduated from our team would not be where they are now if it weren’t for our coaches and mentors. We also thank our dedicated parents who are willing to bring their children to meetings four or more times a week. Our team would not be able to function if it were not for our sponsors, mentors, coaches, and parents. We are also thankful that we are given the opportunities by FIRST to build robots every year and they challenge us increasingly every year.