Timeline
Our team has been around since 2011, so long ago that all our founding members have now graduated high school (and perhaps even college)! Through their and our current members and supporters efforts, however, our team has grown from just a small classroom at Ryle to the biggest at Ignite -- with annual specifics below!
2012
This year's game was basketball based and featured one of our first documented robots! In these pictures, you can see exactly how our robot held basketballs and looked on the field. With which, we improved significantly in overall ranking compared to our previous competition in 2011 despite
still being a rookie team!
2011
Our team was first founded in 2011 in a simple Ryle classroom. There, we gained our first mentor: Mr Lindsay, whose still with the team today! Although no documentation of this era still exists, their accomplishments will forever serve as the start of something incredible.
.png)
2013
This year's challenge was similar to a game of frisbee golf, where teams were tasked with creating a robot that could throw disks into several slots of differing heights. As you see in this photo, at the end of the match, teams could also climb a central tower for additional points!
2014
After years in just one classroom, 2014 was the year we upgraded into a district-wide team! After several years at Ryle, we moved to Gateway and became a team that all of Boone County could join, gaining our former coach -- Ms. Koch -- until her retirement in 2024.
2015
The 2015 game was all about the need for recycling! It involved picking up and stacking totes on scoring platforms as well as putting pool noodles inside recycling containers. In these photos, you can see our sleek build and the team posing in front of it. You can also see our team's field build -- the first of its kind for our team!
2016
In 2016, the yearly FRC challenge morphed into something a little more medieval. In this challenge, we focused mainly on capturing other team's towers via firing boulders to take them down; our team continued to expand as this game generated more and more interest in FRC in our community!
2017
FIRST's 2017 game featured a more steampunk aesthetic and was themed around shooting balls of fuel into a boiler, powering an airship in the center of the field. We also ended up winning a national STEM video contest and ranked 3rd out of 50 teams in the Huntsville, AL tournament this year!
2018
In these photos, we were building a competition robot with multiple motors that control the wheels, telescoping appendage, and winches, and much more. This year's theme was retro and focused primarily on placing power cubes onto a balancing scale until it tipped to one team's side. One of our mentors also won the Mentor of the Year award!
2019
For the 2018-2019 season, we built a 4.5‘ tall competition robot with multiple motors that control the pneumatic and low friction wheels, a camera to aid in operating the robot, and more. We also moved to Ignite Institute before our competition season began, now incorporating both Kenton and
Cincinnati Independent students!
2020
We started out strong this year before the COVID19 pandemic began. We didn't exactly have much competing to do after that, but our team stayed active. We contributed to our community, doing things like 3D printing thousands of mask straps for medical use. Determined to make it through, we remained meeting online!
2021
The 2021 challenge theme was a continuation of the previous year's theme. We struggled a lot in this year, with few new members and a large number of members graduating. However, we still participated in all of FIRST's alternative challenge events and recruited for when the pandemic would finally end.
2022
Making a comeback from the pandemic, we recruited many new members, and made our first new robot in several years -- a robot that, unfortunately, gained much of its infamy from falling off of the transversal bar during qualifications (at about 8ft in the air)!
2023
Our main goal in 2023 and continuing forward into the 2024 season was to secure a slot at Worlds through competition. We had an extremely large growth of members, and intended to help each of them find their place in our team to expand our growth ten-fold through initiatives with FLL and Ignite!
2024
In 2024, our Spoti-Pi robot became one of our best performing robots of all time, ranking 9th at the off-season RiverBOaT Rumble event and 15th at the St. Louis Regional! Although we did not qualify for Worlds this season, we were incredibly proud to take home a new award for the team: the Imagery Award in honor of Jack Kamen!
2025
In 2025, despite losing almost 60% of our team, we succeeded in winning the FIRST Impact Award at the Miami Valley Regional! Soon after, we became the first Kentucky team to ever win an award at the Houston Championship; we sincerely hope to continue to improve towards achieving the international Impact Award in the years to come!
