Community
Isentropic Robotics runs a season-round calendar of workshops, scrimmages, and outreach events alongside its competition program, and partners with local schools and volunteer mentors to extend that work beyond the team itself. The timeline below records those events; the updates that follow report on the outreach, mentorship, and education programs that connect the team to the wider community.
Community events
- 2026
Cascade Regional Qualifier
The team brought twenty-two students and four mentors to the two-day event, along with a rotating pit crew that kept the robot on the field for all ten of its qualification matches. The drive team finished qualifications ranked sixth of thirty-six teams and was selected as the second pick for the third-seeded alliance, which advanced to the semifinals before being eliminated.
Cascade Precision, the team’s machining sponsor, sent a representative to staff the pit and assist with an overnight repair after a mechanism jammed during Friday’s final qualification match; the part was remachined and reinstalled before Saturday’s matches began. The team also shared pit space with a first-year team from a neighboring school, an informal mentorship arrangement that the two teams’ lead mentors have agreed to continue at the next event.
The scouting team’s match-prediction accuracy, tracked as an internal metric since last season, held at just under eighty percent across the event, which the strategy lead credits to a revised scouting form introduced during preseason. That form will carry forward to the team’s second regional next month unchanged.
Build Season Kickoff Workshop
Attendance was near-total for the first weekend of the season: forty-one of the team’s forty-six registered members were present, along with five mentors. The morning was spent watching the season’s game reveal as a group and working through the rulebook section by section, and the afternoon split into subteam sessions on CAD conventions, machine shop safety, and the programming team’s software stack.
A mechanical engineer from Cascade Precision, the team’s longtime machining sponsor, volunteered for the shop safety session and stayed through the afternoon to answer questions from students using the mill and lathe for the first time. Two alumni now studying engineering at nearby universities returned to help run the CAD session for newer members.
By the end of the day, each subteam had a rough strategy brief and a list of mechanisms to prototype in the first week, and the shop’s tool checkout log showed every major tool signed out at least once, a reasonable proxy for how much of the membership actually got hands-on. The safety session uncovered that several returning members had never been checked off on the belt sander, which has since been added as a standing item in the season’s first-week checklist.
- 2025
Community STEM Outreach Day
The event drew around 120 attendees over the course of the morning, most of them elementary and middle school students accompanied by a parent or guardian. Isentropic Robotics staffed four stations: a driving course for the prior season’s competition robot, a soldering table supervised by two mentors, a LEGO-based mechanism-building activity for younger children, and a question table where alumni described what a season on the team actually involves.
The library provided the meeting room and handled registration, while Northwest STEM Partners, a regional nonprofit that funds outreach at several area schools, covered the cost of take-home electronics kits for every child who visited the soldering table. This was the team’s second year running the event with both partners, and attendance grew by roughly a third over the previous year.
Several families asked about joining a beginner-friendly program, which the team does not currently offer below high school age; that gap has been raised with Northwest STEM Partners as a possible joint project for next year. In the meantime, two of the visiting middle schoolers’ families followed up to ask about touring the team’s workshop, and both tours have since been scheduled.
Off-Season Scrimmage
Roughly thirty students attended, split evenly between returning members and newcomers recruited over the summer. Three neighboring teams accepted the invitation and brought robots from the prior season, giving the group enough robots on the field to run full six-team matches for most of the afternoon.
The scrimmage was organized jointly with the Sunset High School robotics club, which supplied the gymnasium and field elements left over from a regional event earlier in the year. A local hardware distributor donated a set of practice batteries for the day, which meant no team had to sit out a match waiting for a charge.
The redesigned swerve drivetrain performed well enough to confirm the mechanical direction for the next build season, though the scouting team flagged a wiring layout that made mid-match repairs slower than intended. That note was folded directly into the season’s build checklist. New members rotated through drive, scouting, and pit crew roles throughout the day, and several asked to join the mechanical subteam permanently afterward.
Community updates
- 2026
- 2025