Texas Instruments Corporate sponsor · DFW
Texas Instruments backs Team 9128 with roughly $25,000 through the TI Foundation, led by its director Andy Smith, but the relationship goes well past funding. Engineers and professionals from TI spent a full day at the 24,000 sqft Innovation Hub, mentoring students, watching live demonstrations of state-champion robots, and holding candid Q&A sessions about real careers in technology. Students have also toured TI's labs, run a robotics showcase at the company's Bring Your Kids to Work Day, and spoken to a room of 400 engineers at the TI Volunteer Luncheon two years running. TI's commitment to STEM runs deep across North Texas: in its most recent United Way campaign, employees raised $8.5 million and mobilized more than 1,200 volunteers who reached nearly 20,000 students. For ITKAN students from underrepresented communities, watching professionals take their robots seriously sends one message, that they belong in this field.
View→ T-Mobile Foundation CAD Lab grant · 2024
A $20,000 grant from the T-Mobile Foundation funded ITKAN's CAD Lab, the design backbone behind every robot the teams build. T-Mobile went well beyond writing a check: its engineers came onsite to paint walls and help build out the headquarters by hand. The company now lists ITKAN as an official volunteer program across its entire workforce, a standing relationship rather than a one-time gift. That CAD Lab has since trained hundreds of students in Fusion 360 and Onshape, skills they carry into competition and, eventually, into engineering careers. For a tuition-free program, partners willing to invest in both the tools and the space are what make the model sustainable.
View→ SWYFT Robotics Mentorship & internships
SWYFT Robotics, a FIRST vendor, mentors ITKAN directly and brings students on as interns, where they design products and strength-test real parts alongside the company's engineers. Together they built an open-source CAD library now used by more than 3,000 FRC and FTC teams across 20 countries, with around 50 ready-to-use assemblies, and partnered on “Robot in 3 Days” builds for both FRC and FTC whose open-sourced designs have been viewed well over 100,000 times. SWYFT's laser-cutting center sits inside ITKAN's lab, where the team cuts custom parts and ships them free to rookie and under-resourced teams across East, West, and North Texas. The internships turn classroom CAD into shipped product, a rare chance for students to see their own designs tested and used by teams worldwide. It is industry mentorship in the truest sense: students learning by building the parts that real teams depend on.
View→ Tesla Gigafactory Field visit · Nevada
Team 9128 traveled to Tesla's Gigafactory in Nevada for an exclusive tour of large-scale EV manufacturing and factory automation. They saw the production line up close and heard directly from the engineers who run one of the most automated factories in the world. For students who design and build robots in their own 24,000 sqft hub, it was a look at the same engineering principles, automation, precision, and scale, applied to mass production. Visits like these are a deliberate part of the ITKAN model, connecting the robots students build in competition to the careers those skills lead to. Seeing where the work can go is often what makes a student decide to pursue it.
View→ Toyota Manufacturing Field visit · San Antonio, TX
The team walked the floor of Toyota's truck-manufacturing plant in San Antonio, seeing a full assembly line, industrial robotics, and lean manufacturing in action. Engineers showed students how the same problem-solving they use on a competition robot, designing for reliability, speed, and repeatability, plays out across an entire production system. For many students it was their first time inside a major manufacturing facility, and a vivid picture of what an engineering career can look like at scale. Field visits like these are a core part of how ITKAN bridges the classroom and the working world. They turn an abstract idea, that STEM leads somewhere, into something students can see and touch.
View→ KAUST, Saudi Arabia Research partner
ITKAN partnered with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) to launch one of the first FTC teams in Saudi Arabia for the 2026-27 season, only the third in the entire country. The connection began an ocean away: AI researcher Dr. Mohammed ElHoseiny discovered ITKAN through its 2023 Al Jazeera feature, which reached a live audience across the Middle East. He reached out, flew to Plano to see the model up close, and left determined to seed FIRST at a world-class research university back home. The partnership roots a competitive robotics team at one of the region's premier institutions, with ITKAN providing the playbook it has refined over years. It is proof that the pipeline now reaches students whose path into engineering runs through Thuwal, not just Texas, and that the right media moment can open an entirely new front for the movement.
View→ APPNA Convention Dallas · 2025
ITKAN brought its robotics program to the 2025 APPNA convention in Dallas, engaging more than 4,000 physicians of South-Asian descent, part of a national network of some 15,000 doctors, along with their families. Students ran live robot demonstrations and talked with attendees about FIRST, putting the program in front of one of the country's most influential professional communities. Conventions like APPNA are a deliberate outreach strategy: ITKAN has introduced more than 50,000 people to the FIRST ecosystem through booths like this one. The goal is twofold, to recruit the next generation of students and to connect with professionals who can mentor, fund, and open doors. For the physicians' children in the room, it was a first, hands-on look at a path into engineering.
View→ Texas Instruments Corporate sponsor · DFW
Texas Instruments backs Team 9128 with roughly $25,000 through the TI Foundation, led by its director Andy Smith, but the relationship goes well past funding. Engineers and professionals from TI spent a full day at the 24,000 sqft Innovation Hub, mentoring students, watching live demonstrations of state-champion robots, and holding candid Q&A sessions about real careers in technology. Students have also toured TI's labs, run a robotics showcase at the company's Bring Your Kids to Work Day, and spoken to a room of 400 engineers at the TI Volunteer Luncheon two years running. TI's commitment to STEM runs deep across North Texas: in its most recent United Way campaign, employees raised $8.5 million and mobilized more than 1,200 volunteers who reached nearly 20,000 students. For ITKAN students from underrepresented communities, watching professionals take their robots seriously sends one message, that they belong in this field.
View→ T-Mobile Foundation CAD Lab grant · 2024
A $20,000 grant from the T-Mobile Foundation funded ITKAN's CAD Lab, the design backbone behind every robot the teams build. T-Mobile went well beyond writing a check: its engineers came onsite to paint walls and help build out the headquarters by hand. The company now lists ITKAN as an official volunteer program across its entire workforce, a standing relationship rather than a one-time gift. That CAD Lab has since trained hundreds of students in Fusion 360 and Onshape, skills they carry into competition and, eventually, into engineering careers. For a tuition-free program, partners willing to invest in both the tools and the space are what make the model sustainable.
View→ SWYFT Robotics Mentorship & internships
SWYFT Robotics, a FIRST vendor, mentors ITKAN directly and brings students on as interns, where they design products and strength-test real parts alongside the company's engineers. Together they built an open-source CAD library now used by more than 3,000 FRC and FTC teams across 20 countries, with around 50 ready-to-use assemblies, and partnered on “Robot in 3 Days” builds for both FRC and FTC whose open-sourced designs have been viewed well over 100,000 times. SWYFT's laser-cutting center sits inside ITKAN's lab, where the team cuts custom parts and ships them free to rookie and under-resourced teams across East, West, and North Texas. The internships turn classroom CAD into shipped product, a rare chance for students to see their own designs tested and used by teams worldwide. It is industry mentorship in the truest sense: students learning by building the parts that real teams depend on.
View→ Tesla Gigafactory Field visit · Nevada
Team 9128 traveled to Tesla's Gigafactory in Nevada for an exclusive tour of large-scale EV manufacturing and factory automation. They saw the production line up close and heard directly from the engineers who run one of the most automated factories in the world. For students who design and build robots in their own 24,000 sqft hub, it was a look at the same engineering principles, automation, precision, and scale, applied to mass production. Visits like these are a deliberate part of the ITKAN model, connecting the robots students build in competition to the careers those skills lead to. Seeing where the work can go is often what makes a student decide to pursue it.
View→ Toyota Manufacturing Field visit · San Antonio, TX
The team walked the floor of Toyota's truck-manufacturing plant in San Antonio, seeing a full assembly line, industrial robotics, and lean manufacturing in action. Engineers showed students how the same problem-solving they use on a competition robot, designing for reliability, speed, and repeatability, plays out across an entire production system. For many students it was their first time inside a major manufacturing facility, and a vivid picture of what an engineering career can look like at scale. Field visits like these are a core part of how ITKAN bridges the classroom and the working world. They turn an abstract idea, that STEM leads somewhere, into something students can see and touch.
View→ KAUST, Saudi Arabia Research partner
ITKAN partnered with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) to launch one of the first FTC teams in Saudi Arabia for the 2026-27 season, only the third in the entire country. The connection began an ocean away: AI researcher Dr. Mohammed ElHoseiny discovered ITKAN through its 2023 Al Jazeera feature, which reached a live audience across the Middle East. He reached out, flew to Plano to see the model up close, and left determined to seed FIRST at a world-class research university back home. The partnership roots a competitive robotics team at one of the region's premier institutions, with ITKAN providing the playbook it has refined over years. It is proof that the pipeline now reaches students whose path into engineering runs through Thuwal, not just Texas, and that the right media moment can open an entirely new front for the movement.
View→ APPNA Convention Dallas · 2025
ITKAN brought its robotics program to the 2025 APPNA convention in Dallas, engaging more than 4,000 physicians of South-Asian descent, part of a national network of some 15,000 doctors, along with their families. Students ran live robot demonstrations and talked with attendees about FIRST, putting the program in front of one of the country's most influential professional communities. Conventions like APPNA are a deliberate outreach strategy: ITKAN has introduced more than 50,000 people to the FIRST ecosystem through booths like this one. The goal is twofold, to recruit the next generation of students and to connect with professionals who can mentor, fund, and open doors. For the physicians' children in the room, it was a first, hands-on look at a path into engineering.
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