34148 CDC.zip

We are CDC.zip , a robotics club from San Rafael, Mendoza, Argentina. Our identity was born from the need to merge our academic background with our technical passion: we took the initials of Colegio del Carmen (CDC) and compressed them under the .zip extension, symbolizing efficiency and the synthesis of talent in a technological format.

Our journey began in local, regional, and national competitions, but the desire to push our own limits led us to register for FTC in December 2025. In a record time of just three months, we went through an intensive process of design iteration, strategy, and complex problem-solving, which culminated at the Regional stage on February 26–27, emerging as the Winning Alliance and earning the 2nd Inspire Award.

We are a “compressed team” of only 7 students and 2 mentors, which compels us to maximize every resource and every role. Today, reaching the European Premier Event represents an opportunity for us to prove that, regardless of team size or geographical distance, engineering and collaborative work have no borders. We are here to learn, compete, and continue expanding the limits of what we can build.

As a team, during our robot’s build phase, there were many internal experiences and anecdotes that consolidated the group and strengthened our relationship. Some of them helped us during this process, and others defined our work philosophy.

One of our main references are our “ducks.” These are a sort of legend in programming (known as rubber duck debugging), where the programmer, seeking to solve an issue within the code, uses the duck for moral support by explaining the problems to it. By stating the problems out loud, our subconscious processes the issue, and in this way, we can find the solution to the bug. This philosophy, obviously, applies outside of programming as well, and it is something that, alongside the FIRST Core Values, accompanied CDC.zip throughout the process.

Another phrase that represents us is: “We are not islands, we are high-speed train stations.” This means that the different areas or subteams within our team shouldn’t work in isolation without collaborating with each other (like islands). Instead, we must interact with one another to work more fluidly and enable a strong connection between the subteams, allowing the different interconnected areas to yield a completely synergistic result.