Team iDK
Welcome to the official website of Team iDK, a highschool robotics team from the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. The team was organized by students to provide an opportunity for other students to learn and participate in robotics and to supplement the engineering program at IMSA.

Rethinking Robotics and IMSA
IMSA allows us to spend our Wednesdays researching things of our interest. Three members of the Robotics team are doing research into different designs, building methods, parts, CAD, automation, and lots of other robotics related topics. So far we have covered CAD and can all produce multi part drawings in Autodesk Inventor. Now we are moving to get a Vex kit to test drive systems before competition and manipulators after competition. We hope to test Holonomic, tank tread, Mecanum, and other hybrid drives. The Mecanum drive will be the most difficult to build because we do not know where to get the wheels, but we hope to test it against our hybrid drive that we hope will be just as effective and mobile while being cheaper and easier to build.

Recruiting
The core team of the robotics team, the members of the research project, have been out giving presentations to local schools hoping to excite the spirit of FIRST into the community. So far we have presented to groups at both Oswego and Oswego East high schools and we hope to present to many more. There is even the possibility that we present to the National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science, and Technology. If we succeed at presenting to this group we could possibly help start over 50 teams. That would be a dream come true.

The Club
Once again, Caterpillar agreed to sponsor us and is now providing classes to use on topics in engineering. We are planing to compete in a mock competition hosted by Winovation that will involve vex robots. During the classes we will work with the Oswego team to help get them started so that they have a fighting chance once the actual FIRST competition starts.

Intersession
IMSA allows for a week long period after winter break between the semesters to study topics that interest us. Last year the robotics intersession was a success because we used it to design and build some of our robot in the first week of the competition build period. This year we are having our intersession and hope to have the same result, especially considering we have doubled the number of people in the club.