My name is Andrea Vega and I am a senior at Lane Tech High School located in Chicago, IL. On behalf of my team, I have created a GoFundMe campaign to hopefully raise money and allow us to build our robots and enter competitions.

Due to recent issues with budget cuts in CPS (Chicago Public Schools) and several other cuts, our team will no longer be funded by the school, and so it is up to us to make the money we need in order to successfully build and register our robots in competitions. 

The organization that we participate in is known as FIRST Robotics. My school participates in both the FIRST Tech Challenge and the FIRST Robotics Competition.  FTC begins at the beginning of the school year, kicking off on September 10, 2016 and running until at least mid-December where teams first compete in a qualifier for later competitions. An average FTC team consists of about 10 students. FRC begins at the middle of the school year, kicking off January 7th, 2017 and runs until April. The amount of people on an FRC team varies greatly, but our FRC team consists of 20 people carefully handpicked by our coaches.

Lane Tech has four FTC teams and one FRC team.  The average season costs per, including: team registration, a robot kit of parts, event registration, travel, and additional costs for teams is approximately $3000. This means that we need about $12,000 alone for our FTC teams.  The annual fees for team registration, a robot kit of parts, and event participation are $5,000 - $6,000. A second regional event will cost us another $4,000. To build our competition robot and a practice robot, along with travel, food, team shirts and other optional items, it will cost about an extra $10,000.  This totals up to about $30,000 to supply all of our teams for one whole year. 

The robotics team means so much to me because it has opened up so many opportunities for me and has let me grow so much as a person. Without it, I would not know the great people that I do today and I would have not found my passion.

Any donation will be greatly appreciated as we are in a terrible situation, and we will definitely make sure we reach out to thank you personally. 

Any donors are welcome to robot demos which can be given to offices and schools in the Chicagoland area. We can do birthday parties as well! Well, we haven’t yet, but we totally would! If your company needs a website or logo, one of our talented graphic designers /web developers can help you with that as well. We’re willing to listen to any ideas you might have.

Our website is http://www.xmachina4645.com/

For further information, please feel free to email me at [email redacted], [email redacted], or call me at [phone redacted]. 
To reach our head coach, his name is Benjamin Durham. His email is [email redacted]