Frequently Asked Questions

Day-to-day team communication happens over Slack and Google Drive — that's where members, mentors, and coaches share updates, files, and sub-team business.

Deep Space Robotics operates under San Benito Robotics (SBR), our 501(c)(3) nonprofit parent organization, which handles the team's finances, insurance, and official communications. Because of that, emails to parents and families — meeting reminders, permission slips, season updates — come from @sanbenitorobotics.com addresses (for example, dsr@sanbenitorobotics.com), not a personal or school address. If you get an email from that domain, it's really us.

Practice is hands-on and organized around our nine sub-teams — depending on the season, that might mean CAD design, wiring electronics, writing code, machining parts, or planning strategy, all happening in parallel in the shop.

It depends on where we are in the season. During build season, the team puts in roughly 16 hours a week combined across weeknight and weekend sessions — individual practices can run anywhere from about 3.5 hours on a weeknight up to 8–9 hours on a weekend build day. The schedule is set by our advisors at the start of each season.

On-season (build season) is the intense ~8-week stretch that starts at Kickoff in January, when we design, build, and refine our competition robot under a hard deadline before competing in the spring.

Off-season is the rest of the year — used for officer elections, skills training and bootcamps, fundraising, community outreach events, and planning for the next season.

Every member, mentor, and coach is held to the same Code of Conduct. The short version:

• Respect every teammate, regardless of role, tenure, or background — and help new members find a real way to contribute early.
• We compete under FIRST's Core Values: Discovery, Innovation, Impact, Inclusion, Teamwork, and Fun — practiced through Gracious Professionalism: compete hard, treat everyone with respect, and help other teams when you can.
• Workshop safety rules apply every time, no exceptions — and anyone, any role, any age, can stop work over a safety concern.
• Be critical of ideas, not people. Disagreement over a design or strategy is healthy; personal attacks aren't tolerated.
• Mistakes are treated as information, not failure — and there's always a clear path to raise a concern, from your sub-team lead up to a coach.

Nine: Design, Electrical, Fabrication, Finance, Human Resources, Marketing, Programming, Safety, and Strategy. Members choose a sub-team (and optionally a second, dual sub-team) each season.

Officer positions — Team Captain, Technical Vice Captain, and Business Vice Captain — are elected by a majority vote of the full team at the start of each off-season. Members must attend Boot Camp before they're eligible to vote.

Once elected, the Officers review applications and select the sub-team leads (one for each of the nine sub-teams) by majority vote among themselves.

Technical skills: CAD and mechanical design, programming in Python and Java, electronics and wiring, and working with sensors, motors, and control systems.

Professional skills: team leadership and project planning, public speaking, community outreach and organizing, fundraising and resource management, and time management under real deadlines.

Students run their own meetings and lead their own sub-teams — it's real project-management experience, not a simulation, and it lines up well with CTE pathways and college or job applications.

Show active participation and engagement, uphold the team's Code of Conduct and FIRST's Core Values, follow workshop safety rules without exception, and communicate with the team through the right channels (Slack for day-to-day, escalating conflicts through your sub-team lead when needed). Members must also comply with their school's academic and behavioral eligibility policies to hold a leadership position.