Team 867 “Absolute Value” is a student-led engineering team based at Arcadia High School in Southern California.
For more than two decades, our students have taken ideas from paper to reality through designing, prototyping, manufacturing, wiring, programming, testing, and competing with systems they build themselves.
Our program is connected to Arcadia High School’s Engineering Design & Development CTE capstone course, giving students the opportunity to apply what they learn in the classroom to real engineering challenges. Members come from different backgrounds and interests, from mechanical engineering and computer science to electronics, CAD, business, art, and community outreach, but work toward one common goal.
Learn by doing. Build. Grow annually.
Built by students
Students are responsible for nearly every part of running the organization—from designing and manufacturing the robot to programming, fundraising, sponsor communication, competition preparation, and community outreach.
Students do the engineering, run outreach, communicate with sponsors, manage competition preparation, and teach each other. Mentors and teachers guide us, but students are responsible for turning ideas into working inventions.
Our engineering pathway
EDD is connected to Arcadia High School’s Career Technical Education Engineering pathway. Engineering Design & Development is the capstone course—the highest-level class in the pathway where students apply skills learned throughout previous engineering courses to real projects. Our sponsors therefore support not only a competition team, but an engineering education program connected to Arcadia High School and the Arcadia Unified School District.
Learning from each other
We typically return only around 10 experienced members each year. That means more than half of Team 867 begins each season with little or no previous experience on the team. Rather than seeing this as a disadvantage, we make teaching part of our culture. New students first gain experience through the JPL season before joining the larger FRC build, creating a cycle where experienced students teach the next generation.
Rooted in difference
Our team brings together students with different technical interests, experiences, cultures, and perspectives. Students who come from historically underrepresented groups participate throughout our technical and leadership roles, while members from a variety of cultural backgrounds work together toward one engineering goal. Each member’s distinct upbringing contributes to their unique qualifications that provide us with something especially valuable in engineering: different ways of solving the same problem.
Our fall-to-spring learning cycle
Each year begins with smaller engineering challenges through the NASA JPL Invention Challenge before transitioning into the FIRST Robotics Competition, where the entire team works together to create a full-scale competition robot. Our philosophy is very simple:
Looking ahead
In the coming years, Arcadia High School is also preparing to expand its engineering facilities, giving programs like ours the potential to serve more students and take on larger projects. However, additional space does not cover the cost of operating our team.
Maintaining our momentum from last season, and continuing to compete, training new members, and building our program, is what will allow us to fully use those opportunities in the future.
Keeping engineering accessible
As a high-cost student engineering program with no school funding, we depend heavily on sponsors, grants, and in-kind support to keep these opportunities accessible.
Support our program →