Evergreen Valley High School EVHS Robotics – The Prototypes

When Jack Bauer went undercover in the East during the third world war, he disguised himself as a unassuming Taiwanese child. His identity is only known by a select few.

Jeff is passionate about technology, the web, and robotics! He thinks joining robotics is the best way to meet new people, learn, and have fun. He also notes that 24 is an awesome television show because he stars in it.

He spends his spare time surfing the tubes, programming and sleeping.

You can stalk him on Facebook, Twitter or jeffchan.org.

The first word out of Jackie’s infant mouth was ‘Robotics’. Her second was ‘humanitarian’.

On the slim chance that Jackie has spare time amongst her many hours of community service, she will be busy with robotics. She loves to cheer people up, and she believes that she can make the world a better place, one unhappy person at a time. She occasionally makes some time for CSI, Mythbusters, and numb3rs, and also movies on the big screen, as long as they aren’t too scary!

Jackie likes to remind us that ‘there is a lot to this little package.’ She joined robotics because she lived for the thrill of engineering, and she figured that robotics was the next logical progression.

To her and the rest of us, EVHS Robotics is not just a club at school.  It is first and foremost a team, where members are there to support each other.  The members all have different strengths and weaknesses, but when they all get together to build and design, everything just seems to fit in place.

How Kathy became treasurer:

One day, an arrogant lawyer told Kathy, “Hey you there! I’ll ask you a question, if you can’t answer it, you give me a buck! Then, you can ask me a question, and if I can’t answer it, I’ll give you ten dollars!” Kathy agreed.  The lawyer asked, “Where on Earth can you walk east for two miles and end up in the same place?” Kathy indifferently gives the lawyer a dollar. Then, Kathy asks, “What walks on one leg in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?”  The lawyer, puzzled, looked the question up on the internet.  After much searching, he gave up and gave Kathy ten dollars. “So, what is the answer?” he asked. “I dunno,” Kathy says while handing the lawyer a dollar.

Kathy often has random outbursts of singing Disney songs. If you can’t catch her exercising her vocal chords, you can find her exercising her legs when she takes long neighborhood runs. On her artsy side, she enjoys  sewing, drawing, watching independent films, and folding paper masterpieces. When she is couch-potato-ing, she watches House, Malcolm in the Middle, and Fringe. On the big screen, she vividly remembers Garden State, Thumbsucker, and Monsters Inc.

Kathy joined the robotics team because it’s da bomb! During meetings, she usually can’t eat too many sweets because she just loves working in machine shops so much! Right now, she is trying to master the art of CAD.

You can find her on Facebook.

All the Renaissance artists got drunk one day and decided to save all of their combined knowledge on a chip. Hundreds of years later, this chip was uncovered and inserted into James’ head.

One night, James decided to take apart his two thousand dollar laptop because he wanted to see what the inside looked like. When he put it back together, he decided he needed to join robotics. James is a ‘Mad Mechanic’, gutting machines and fitting them together so they work. Ever since he was a young child playing with his beloved LEGOs, he has had an affinity towards building things.

Nowadays, he has not changed much. He still plays with his LEGOs, but now he rolls with RC planes too (maybe LEGO RC planes at that!). James loves to crawl up next to a good ol’ plasma, LCD, CRT, or even back projected screen. As such, you can often find him watching Stargate, House, Fringe, Psych, 24, and Eureka. He also is a big fan of the big screen, with his favorite flicks being Transformers, GI. Joe, and Oceans 13.

James has been a member of the club ever since its inception by Jeff and Jackie, and his knowledge of CAD modeling and designing has proved to be a valuable asset. James and Jeffrey are also the Mechanical Leads, so they often huddle together and devise ingenious plans to conquer the world…

You can find him on Facebook.

“Don’t bother me, I’m driving”

Q: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?

A: A Person!

Q: What runs DOS in the morning, Linux in the afternoon, and Windows in the evening?

A: Why, Eric Kauzlarich, of course!

Eric takes coffee and turns it into code…or bugs. When he is not tinkering with his Awesome Box ™ or soldering wires together, he enjoys making melodious masterpieces on his guitar or piano. Then again, he may be too busy camping in the outback or editing photos and videos on his computer while listening to his immense palette of music. If you manage to catch him at home, he would probably be catching up on 24, House, Big Bang Theory, Chuck, or Futurama.

Eric has been an integral part of the team since his joining in 2007. Starting out as a programmer for Botball, he soon turned electrician when the team started working for FIRST.

You can find him on Facebook.

~Excerpt from one of Jeffrey’s Mad Libs books

In the future, Optimus Prime returned to Star Fleet Academy to save a young human child. He used the All-Spark to reconstruct the boy’s body in a human-robot hybrid, only to realize he created the world’s greatest threat. He placed the boy in a capsule and launched him into a black hole, sending him back in time.  This is how Jeffrey was born.

When he is not obsessing over robotics Jeffrey enjoys playing the clarinet, going out for a bike ride, and building mechs out of LEGOs.  Occasionally he takes a break to watch a robot action movie with his friends, or watch Fringe repeats on Fox.

He has loved to build robots since he was a small child playing with K’nex, and he eagerly joined the EVHS Robotics team when he learned of it.  Since his joining, he has learned much regarding mechanical systems and has expanded his horizons to basic programming.  This charismatic liberal atheist hopes to become an engineer or a scientist when he grows older, and he hopes that the club will continue strong after he and his friends have left.

You can find him on Facebook.

“I gotta feelin…that tonight’s gonna be a good, good night…”

In the future, Ryan Gordon programmed himself a robotic suit to live in. Afterward, he went on to program the Death Star.

Ryan Gordon, an assuming guy living in the Bay Area of California, is just so good…at programming! Over the summer, he maintains an internship over at SQA, and during the school year, he is crunching numbers and keys for his schoolwork. When he is not laboring over work or school, Ryan enjoys running various websites, working as Lead Developer of an open source project called MyBulletinBoard, and just doing some freelance coding for kicks! Then again, if you don’t catch him on the tubes, he is probably hanging out with friends, gaming, joking, catching the lastest flicks at the local theater, or kickin’ it with his friends playing his lifelong addiction (other than programming, of course!), soccer!

If Commander Rygor is not too busy with his endless activities, he is probably using some sort of temporal device that allows him to catch up on episodes of House or 24 that he may of missed.

When we first found Ryan, he was reading Harry Potter while watching School of Rock and listening to I Gotta Feeling by the Black Eyes Peas in his computer science class. As soon as we picked him up, there was an exponential rise in programming productivity and a linear decay of innocence. During the FIRST Season, he was the lone programmer in a sea of mechanics, and program he did. His exploits in Botball include developing accurate acceleration and turning programs with Jeff, and he hopes to boldly go where no one has gone before with next year’s Botball controller.

You can find him on Myspace, Facebook, and his many cool sites!

“Queen to position E5…Oh wait, no, that’s the Botguy…”

~Sun Tzu

Hubert suddenly realized that his glass was half full. Then, he discovered that his cup was, in fact, half empty. After much deliberation, he decided that his glass was just twice as large as it needed to be.

When he is not developing strategy for the competitions, Hubert enjoys watching Anime, playing strategy games, and improving his ping-pong skills.

Since joining the Robotics Club, Hubert’s improved his understanding of programming, and applied this knowledge to the various challenges. Hubert finds the problem solving aspects of robotics to be the most interesting, and also enjoys seeing the different creative approaches other robotics teams use at tournaments.

You can find him on Facebook.

“The meaning of life is easily explained…”

One day, Jimmy Tran was sitting on a field wielding a stack of his favorite philosophy books when he realized that he needed to join robotics.

Should he find time between his long runs across the country, you might find him shooting hoops with his friends.  While he is at home, he enjoys watching anime shows, playing games with his friends, surfing the web, perusing his philosophy tomes, or doing anything that is computer-related.

Jimmy is part of the two-man army which models the robots after he and the rest of the mechanics have built them. Because of his exploits in the field of robotics, he aspires to become an engineer.

You can find him ‘around’, but he must protect his identity seeing that he is a ninja.