We are the Cactus High School Robotics Club. Team 498 in the FIRST Robotics Competition. Our goal this year is to expand our team to reach as many students as possible (even outside of our school), and to expose our team to more teams and ideas by traveling to more competitions. This coming year will be our 8th year of competition in the FIRST Robotics Competition. We are a school sponsored club, meeting at Cactus High School in Glendale, Arizona. Even though we are indeed a school club, we are one of the groups more oriented to learning and preparing the students to later work in real life situations.

The club is presented with obstacles to overcome while running an operation as closely related to a business that you can get on a school campus. Our members must learn to handle working under a deadline, thinking creatively to overcome a hallenge, manage "company" funds, work closely with engineers and peers, listen to each other's ideas, and be competitive without forgoing good sportsmanship. Along with all of those things our goal is to have fun learning about the things we are interested in.

This year we plan on running short workshops in the fall to expose students to work in each of the three robot build areas (mechanical, electrical, and programming) and to media public relations work. We hope to attend at least 2 competitions in the Spring for the large robot, and may compete in the PAReX (Phoenix Area Robotics eXperimenters) small robot competition or the FIRST Vex robot competition as well. This year should be a new and exciting year.