You don't have to be picked
Spectrum is a year-round engineering program, not a selective club. It is open to every student at St. Agnes — no application, no interview, no teacher recommendation, no prerequisite course. If you want in, you're in.
St. Agnes Academy · FRC Team 3847
You can just join.
That's the whole requirement.
Spectrum 3847 is the robotics and engineering team St. Agnes started in 1996 and has co-founded and co-owned since 2011. There are no requirements to join. No application, no tryout, no prerequisite class. You don't need to be good at math or science. There is a role on this team for everyone — and 42% of the roster are young women.
The interest form takes about a minute and commits you to nothing. It just tells us you want to hear more.
Before you talk yourself out of it
The three things everybody gets wrong about us.
You don't have to be a math person
Nobody looks at your grades. The team writes and publishes its own beginner training and it starts from actual zero — "What is FRC?", "Intro to CAD", "Intro to Java", "Intro to the Spectrum Shop", building a bumper corner, running a 3D printer.
You don't have to love robots
Somebody has to shoot the photos, run the pit, write the awards submissions, plan the strategy, and teach kids at summer camp. There is a role on this team for everyone, and plenty of them never touch a wrench.
The team you'd be joining
84 students. 15 straight seasons. Two schools, one program.
42%Of the roster are young women — on drive team, in CAD, and in fabrication
84Students across the program
15Consecutive competition seasons since 2011
100%Of members have gone on to pursue STEM in college
13Languages spoken between us
Find your job
Nine ways to be useful here.
A robot is maybe half of what this team does. Pick the thing that already sounds like you — you can change your mind later, and most people do.
Build it
The shop: a 1200 W fiber laser, a waterjet, a printer farm, an in-house powder-coating booth. Beginner shop training starts with a bumper corner and a rubber-band car.
Design it
CAD in Onshape — the same tool professional engineers use. Every model the team makes is published publicly, so your work becomes a portfolio you can point a college at.
Program it
Java, on real hardware, split into groups like drive tuning, autonomous path planning, and vision. "Intro to Java Programming" assumes you have never written a line.
Drive it
A drive team is up to five people. Photon 8515 deliberately rotates its drivers between matches so more members get the controls, and first-year students take those roles.
Call the shots
Strategy and scouting: watching every other robot at an event, logging what it can do, and telling the drive team who to pick for an alliance. Half analysis, half argument.
Run the pit
The pit is the team's storefront at a competition. Someone is always there, because judges and other teams walk up and ask questions all day. It's the most social job at an event.
Shoot it
Media: photography, video, social. The team's media work gets credited by name in the build blog, and there are 140,000 photos and videos in the public gallery to add to.
Write it
Spectrum has published a daily build blog every season since 2012 — students supply the articles, photos, data, and slides. There's a whole Awards track for the students who'd rather write than weld.
Teach it
SPECTacular, the team's free two-week summer camp for 3rd–8th graders, has been designed and taught by Spectrum students since 2012. Members have also volunteered at 92 robotics events.
There are no permanently assigned sub-teams and no year-round captains. The structure is deliberately flat, which is how a student ends up writing code on Tuesday, running the mill on Wednesday, and shooting photos at a competition on Saturday.
Your first year
Rookies don't stand around here. We built a second team to stop that.
On a team of 84 students, the easiest way to fail a new member is to let her spend a season watching. So in 2021 Spectrum created Photon 8515 — a second, real FRC team where first-year students design, CAD, program, and assemble their own competitive robot and take drive-team roles at two district events.
Every Photon member is a Spectrum member and every Spectrum member is a Photon member. It isn't a junior tier — it's where a first-year student gets to be the one making the call. More than ten other FRC teams have copied the idea since.
Show up and get trained
Seven training tracks with slides and video: FRC basics, controls, design and CAD, build, strategy, media, awards. Every one has a beginner module that assumes no background.
Build a whole robot
Your own mechanism on Photon 8515, and drive-team roles at two district events. The team builds four machines a season on purpose, so more students own a real build instead of watching one.
Own a mechanism
Squad leads act as project managers on one of five mechanisms — drivetrain, intake, indexer, launcher, climber. You pick your squad on a form, and you can say you want to lead it.
You won't be the only one
St. Agnes didn't join this team. St. Agnes started it.
St. Agnes has fielded an engineering team since 1996, eleven years before Strake Jesuit had one. In 2011, after three years of competing against each other in BEST Robotics, students from both campuses set the rivalry aside, secured sponsors, won over two administrations, and launched one joint FRC team. St. Agnes is a Principal Founding Partner of Spectrum — not a guest.
Today 42% of the roster are young women, and that number counts drive team, CAD, and fabrication — not clipboards. The team also runs Girls' Lab Days specifically for St. Agnes students, and every summer the Texas Robotics Invitational that Spectrum hosts opens with the Girls' Drive, a tournament in which robots may only be driven by female team members. 82 female-led drive teams have competed in it since 2024.
Janet Garcia found engineering on this team. She graduated in 2022, now interns at NASA, and mentors another FRC team.
Spectrum 3847 · 2026 Impact Magazine
The honest logistics
You don't have to quit anything you already do.
The after-school schedule is deliberately flexible so students can carry robotics alongside sports, music, and student leadership — the team credits that flexibility as a big part of why people stay. Even during build season, the weekly all-team design recap is Monday at 6 pm and the lab closes at 7 so everyone gets an early night. Once a month, "FIRST Friday Fun" is purely social.
The team runs on Slack, so you can follow along and ask questions before you ever set foot in the lab. And a real amount of the year has nothing to do with robots: Houston Food Bank shifts — 18,000 meals packed in a single day — a 2,800-can CANstruction sculpture, and 425 3D-printed toys for Toys for Tots.
For the record
This is a serious team. It's just not a selective one.
In 2026 Spectrum competed at four events, won the Friendswood district event, took a Quality Award and a finalist finish at League City, reached the district championship finals, and played the Curie Division at the FIRST Championship. Photon won the Gracious Professionalism Award at its Houston district event. Across fifteen seasons: 44 judged awards and 41 medals.
Spectrum also gives all of it away. It published FRC's first daily build blog in 2012 and hasn't missed a season since, releases the full CAD and code from kickoff onward, co-founded the Open Alliance in 2020, and hosts the Texas Robotics Invitational every June. Students write it, shoot it, and present it.
Every team member has a special place in the process and creation of our robots.
Spectrum 3847 mission statementHow to join
Three links. Start with the first one.
You don't have to do all three today. The first one is genuinely just "tell us you're curious."
Tell us you're interested
The St. Agnes Student Spectrum Interest Form. About a minute, and it commits you to nothing at all — we'll follow up with what's happening next and when you can come see the lab.
Open the interest form →Get on the Slack
Slack is where the team actually lives — every mechanism squad has a channel, meetings run as Slack huddles, and it's the fastest place to ask a question and get a real answer from a student.
Join the Slack →Register on the roster
The full St. Agnes roster registration form. This is the one that formally makes you a member of the team. Do it whenever you've decided — you can fill out the interest form first and take your time.
Register for the team →Straight answers
Questions people actually ask.
Do I need any experience?
None. The team publishes its own training curriculum and rebuilds it
every fall, with beginner modules that assume nothing: "What is FRC?",
"What do team members do?", "Intro to CAD (Onshape)", "Intro to Java
Programming", "Intro to the Spectrum Shop". You can even read the
whole thing before you join — it's public at
spectrum3847.org/resources/training.
I'm bad at math and science. Is this pointless for me?
No. Nobody checks your grades, and there's no prerequisite course.
Some of the most important jobs on the team — media, pit, strategy,
awards writing, outreach — are reading, writing, organizing, and
talking-to-people jobs. The team's own mission statement is built
around appreciating students' varying abilities.
Will I be the only girl there?
No. 42% of the roster are young women, spread across drive team, CAD,
and fabrication. St. Agnes co-founded the team and has run an
engineering program since 1996. There are also Girls' Lab Days for St.
Agnes students, and the Girls' Drive tournament at the team's own
summer event.
How much time does it take? I already play a sport.
The after-school schedule is intentionally flexible so students can do
robotics alongside sports, music, and student leadership — the team
says that's a major reason members stay. Build season is the busiest
stretch; even then the Monday all-team recap is at 6 pm and the
lab closes at 7. For this year's exact days and times, ask in
Slack
or email
team@spectrum3847.org.
Where does the team meet?
Spectrum operates across both campuses on Bellaire Boulevard — St.
Agnes at 9000 Bellaire and Strake Jesuit at 8900 Bellaire — and the
two schools share one lab. It's a walk across the driveway, not a
drive across Houston. Ask in Slack for the current room and the next
time you can come see it.
When is the best time to join?
Now is fine, but summer is the easiest on-ramp: come help at the Texas
Robotics Invitational, the competition Spectrum hosts at Strake Jesuit
every June, or at an outreach event. In 2024 a first summer build camp
had 15 brand-new students build a robot from scratch and compete with
it at TRI.
What if I try it and hate it?
Then you stop, and nothing bad happens. That's exactly why the first
link on this page is an interest form and not a commitment. The team
culture explicitly warns against working so hard that it costs you
your physical or mental health.
Who do I talk to about anything else?
Email team@spectrum3847.org,
or ask in
Slack.
Everything the team has ever published — build blogs, CAD, code,
guides, 140,000 photos — is at
spectrum3847.org.
There's a role on this team for you.
You do not need to know which one yet.
Spectrum 3847 · St. Agnes Academy & Strake Jesuit College Preparatory · Houston, Texas