In the year of 2015,… as a group of young, but ingenious, minds who sought to better the world by building and designing robots, we became the FTC Dry Ice team. The FTC Dry Ice team was founded in May, 2015, after some founding members watched a previous year’s match and were inspired to create their own team. We plan to use our robotics knowledge to help the community by encouraging people to learn engineering, competition, presentation, and gracious professionalism. Now, this is our second year taking part in First Tech Challenge, and have taken a lot of experience from the previous to our advantage.
The Origin of Our Name
Our team follows two engineering rules: DRY and KISS. Thus, it has a nickname DRYKIS. The words are acronyms, with DRY meaning Don’t Repeat Yourself, and KISS meaning Keep It Simple, Stupid. The first part, Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY), is a principle of software development. It points out how you shouldn’t repeat information, and to try to reduce it. The principle was first formed by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, in the book The Pragmatic Programmer. If the DRY principle is used, any changes in a single element of a system doesn’t affect any other unrelated elements. The next acronym, Keep It Simple (KIS), was really Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS), but due to our need to keep the name less explicit, it was shortened. This principle was invented by the US Navy in 1960, stating that most systems work best if kept simple. This is because the higher the number of variables, the lesser the chance of the robot working successfully. One version said by Albert Einstein is the “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
It’s to make what you have simpler, but not so much that you take away from your idea. The name Dry Ice, however, is truly nothing more than a substitute name. The ICE in DRY ICE means Innovative, Creative Engineering.
Dry Ice being our name, and Dry Kis being basic principles the FTC Dry Ice will follow. Both acronyms, DRY and KIS are key parts of robotics, and will suffice well in helping our team, Dry Ice, to succeed!
