“I just thought of it as a great way to give a piece of what we do to the community and really pull them in,” 17-year-old Kaz Collins said.<\/p>\n
The camp teaches participants a variety of skills required to construct a functioning robot, including 3D modeling and printing, distinguishing between motors and servos, and engaging in hands-on trial and error.<\/p>\n
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The backstory:<\/p>\n
Team Duct Tape competes as a FIRST Tech Challenge team, a middle and high-school-level STEM education program where students work with adult mentors to design, build, and program robots to compete in an alliance format against other teams.<\/p>\n
Every year, the youth team builds a brand-new robot to compete across the state. The team’s home base is at AMRoC Fab Lab<\/a> in the University Mall<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Engineering skills taking shape <\/p>\n What they’re saying:<\/p>\n The teenage team members emphasize that robotics is heavily centered around problem-solving and perseverance.<\/p>\n “Very satisfying whenever it finally works, because it never works the first time,” 17-year-old Daniel Fellerhoff said.<\/p>\n Other team members find fulfillment in watching their creations come to life.<\/p>\n “I just think it’s really fun to get to like make something, see how it doesn’t work and fix it,” 13-year-old Emily Logan said.<\/p>\n Logan noted that she hopes camp participants “can learn from this experience that they can do things like this.”<\/p>\n “I just love the idea of being able to just create something and move on its own. That’s the best way I can put it into words,” 15-year-old Austin Varney said.<\/p>\n Varney explained that after doing robotics, “You can like move a problem around in your head once you do something like this.”<\/p>\n Tampa robotics fundraising goals <\/p>\n What you can do:<\/p>\n The inaugural camp also serves as a fundraiser to the upcoming competition season. The team is actively looking for new mentors, corporate sponsors, and new members to join their ranks for the upcoming season.<\/p>\n The Source: The information in this story was gathered through interviews with participants in Team Duct Tape’s summer camp.\u00a0<\/p>\n What’s Right with Tampa Bay<\/a>Tampa<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. – Team Duct Tape, a community-based youth robotics team, hosted its first-ever summer camp to spark…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338903,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[47,629,115,405,135,137,136,628,3970],"class_list":["post-338902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-fl","tag-hillsborough","tag-news","tag-series","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news","tag-us","tag-whats-right-with-tampa-bay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/wrtb-1-1.jpg\")
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