Mentors
Team Appreciate has developed ties with many prominent engineers and because of these relationships, our team has a well-built mentor program. Our mentors spend countless hours with our team working on both the engineering and non-engineering projects that are part of the FIRST competition. Not only are they devoted to passing on their skills to members of our team, but also to the FIRST ethos as a whole.
Lead Mentors
Norman Morgan: FRC 2468 Head Coach
During 17 years as a basketball coach, "Coach" learned how to inspire, a skill that was acknowledged when he received his Woodie Flowers Award at the 2013 Hub City Regional. In addition to his superior teaching and inspiration skills, he’s also well known for his expertise in game strategy. Many of our alliance partners, particularly in elimination matches, quickly learn that his keen strategic ability can mean the difference between a loss and a win. Despite being a keen competitor, Coach is also known for his willingness to listen and his compassion. Coach Morgan has a BS in education from Wayland Baptist College and an MS in education from Texas State University.
Jason Spodick
Jason has been a teacher in the Eanes Independent School District for 13 years, working at the Middle schools and Westlake High School. He was first approached by Norman Morgan and Steve Ramsey about creating a program to bridge the existing Elementary and High school program in 2014. In 2019, Jason moved to teaching fulltime at Westlake High School where he coaches FRC 2468's sister team, FRC 2687. Now in his third year, Jason has really found his place as a passionate coach and a coach the students greatly appreciate.
In Loving Memory of Linda McMahon
Linda was the CEO and co-owner of Pixels & Verbs, LLC and had 20+ years of experience in high-tech management, including work at MessageOne, Pencom, Intrinsity, and AMD. She had been a senior mentor for Team Appreciate since its inception, Linda also mentored other robotics teams in our district as needed. She was the founder and organizer of the Westlake & Eanes Science & Technology Association (WESTA), the nonprofit that helps fund our programs. Linda had an Associate of Applied Science degree and certificate in software project management from The University of Texas at Austin.
Industry Mentors
Scott McMahon
Scott is a computer architecture researcher at Mythic and has been a mentor for Team Appreciate since its inception in 2007. While a senior member of technical staff at Texas Instruments and Luminary Micro, he was the innovator behind the development of the Jaguar motor controller. He was also a member of the FRC control system design team from 2008-2014. In 2014, Scott received the Woodie Flowers Award at the Alamo Regional. Scott holds a BASc in electrical engineering with a minor in computer science from The University of Waterloo. He holds five US patents in circuit design and computer architecture.
Joyce Witowski
Joyce is a quality director at NXP Semiconductor and is the founder and co-owner of Allouette Management Service. She also serves as a non-engineering mentor for FRC 2468 Team Appreciate, which she has mentored (and fed) since 2008. Joyce’s son, Garrett, participated on Team Appreciate for four years and was named a FIRST Robotics “Dean’s List” Finalist in 2012. She has also been a two-time president of the Westlake & Eanes Science & Technology Association (WESTA), the nonprofit that helps fund our programs. Joyce holds a BS and an MS in chemical engineering from Clarkson University.
Greg McKaskle
Coming from National Instruments, Greg McKaskle is an invaluable mentor for Team Appreciate’s programming team. From helping optimize a machine vision algorithm for identifying the hot goal in Aerial Assist to allowing our team to beta test his innovative subsystem framework for LabVIEW, Greg provides experience and serves as a readily available resource whenever we have questions. We can always rely on Greg to help us find innovative solutions for even the simplest problems. For example, Greg taught us how to write a file on the roboRIO in order to store encoder values at a known position. We would not have been able to have as smooth of a swerve drive without Greg’s ability to share his knowledge of PID. We greatly appreciate Greg’s contributions and we are excited to continue working with him.
Andy Howell
Andy Howell got started in robotics when a friend, Steve Sullivan, asked him to help out with the FTC team Steve was mentoring for the 2013-14 season. Andy enjoys machining and metalworking as a hobby, so helping out in the shop is a natural fit. He enjoys teaching the students to use tools and solve problems. Before robotics, Andy was a Scout Master for Boy Scout troop 4, and karate instructor teaching elementary through adult students. He is a founding member of Rai Technology Inc, a provider of financial data distribution software. He develops software to analyze network protocols that transport financial data. Andy lived in Japan for 16 years, a country he fell in love with after serving there with the US Navy in the mid-’80s. In the Navy, he worked on systems to find and track Soviet submarines. His other interests include electronics, amateur radio, hiking, and the occasional foray into mounted archery.
George Tan
George Tan was first exposed to FRC in high school. He moved on to mentoring as a student at Texas Tech, guiding FRC 1817 over a college career twice interrupted with deployments for the National Guard, once to Afghanistan and once to Iraq. George is a Woodie Flowers Finalist Award winner; he was nominated by FRC 1817 and won it in 2014 at the Hub City regional. George is a FIRST senior mentor for the West Texas region and helps teams locally in Austin as well as South Texas when he has a spare minute (ha). He spearheaded the adoption of FTC in West Texas in 2011 and is very active as a key volunteer behind the Hub City regional. During the day he works at Unaliwear, a local Austin startup. George has a BS EE from Texas Tech.
Lisa Rothfus
Lisa has coached FIRST Robotics teams since 2010 when her sons decided to join teams. She has coached all levels of FIRST, including, FLL, FTC, and FRC, helping her teams with presentations, research, engineering notebooks, and outreach. She currently helps coach the SACOT team (STEM Advocacy Conference of Texas) in which members from FTC and FRC teams advocate for STEM legislation, and promote STEM activities, with Texas Legislators. Some of her favorite memories over these last 8 years have been attending the FIRST World competition in Atlanta with her son’s FLL team where they won second in the world for design; winning the INSPIRE Award with her FTC team, the Taus, in 2015, and running two congressional conferences with her SACOT team at the Texas Capitol this past season. She is grateful for all of the amazing students she has been able to work with over these last 9 years.
Adriana Aguilar
Adriana is an FRC alumnus from Team 1817. In high school, she served as Safety Captain, winning her team multiple Safety Awards and a Chairman’s Award, and was named a Dean’s List Finalist. She received her BS in Chemical Engineering from Rice University and her MBA from Texas Tech. Her former FRC mentor introduced her to Team 2468, where she now serves as an outreach and safety mentor.
Isaac Kravitz
Isaac is an alumnus of FRC 2158 ausTIN CANs from 2009-2013, and a mentor for them from 2016-2018. He has worked with the outreach team to help write the chairmans essay, prepare the chairman’s presentation, and assist in robot design and assembly. He received a BS in mechanical engineering from UT, and a MS in nuclear and radiation engineering from UT.
Landon Haugh
Landon is a Systems & Applications Engineer for the Mobile Robotics team at NXP Semiconductors. He is a graduate of Mississippi State University with a B.S. in Computer Engineering. He started participating in FIRST in 2011 with Team Fusion 364 out of Gulfport, MS as a programmer and driver. After graduating high school, Landon mentored Team 364 until moving to Austin. Since moving to Austin, Landon has joined Team Appreciate as a programming mentor and a drive coach for Team Alpha. Landon has a huge passion for robotics and FIRST. He gives a lot of credit to FIRST for inspiring him to become an engineer and for introducing him to invaluable relationships with the mentors he has met along the way.
John Mayo
John Mayo is a Senior Mechanical Engineer at Apptronik, Inc. working to leverage robotics to improve the universal quality of life. Previously, he worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Mars Perseverance Rover sampling system, and other research tasks to bring those samples home. John graduated from Texas A&M University with a Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering and then completed a Master's in Mechanical Engineering at MIT in the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory.
Ryan Nazeritan
Ryan is a Server CPU Validation Engineer at Intel. He is an alumnus of Team Fusion 364 from Gulfport, MS and has been involved with FIRST Robotics since 2003 and has been mentoring since 2009. Ryan graduated from Mississippi State University with a BS and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a focus on automotive control networks (our robots are not much different). While going through graduate school, Ryan was the controls lead and engineering manager of MSU’s Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition team, which focused on hybridizing a 2016 Chevrolet Camaro. In Ryan’s off-time, you will see him working on his 1974 Corvette, racing cars, kayaking, hiking, and usually some microcontroller project.
Emily McKaskle
Emily McKaskle had seven years of experience coaching FIRST LEGO League teams before “graduating” to mentoring FRC. As a working writer of over forty novels, she is living proof that non-technical people can mentor robotics teams.
Luan Heimlich
Jaye Heimlich
Jaye is an alumna of FRC Team 3132, Thunder Down Under and was the lead Impact Award presenter and awards captain in 2017 when the team won the FIRST World Championship Impact Award and entered the Hall of Fame. She was a FIRST Robotics Competition Dean's List finalist and also received the Allaire Medal in 2017, awarded to a student on the winning Hall of Fame team.
For the past 3 years, Jaye worked at FIRST Australia, as the program administrator for the entire FIRST progression of programs. Currently, Jaye is the Professional Development Partner for FIRST LEGO League Explore in Northern California, working at Playing at Learning, after moving from Sydney, Australia.
Jaye is heavily involved in the FRC community in Northern California and is a part of the FIRST Mentor Conference Planning Committee, the FIRST For All Fellowship Committee, Bay Area Regional Planning Committee and volunteers as a judge and Volunteer Coordinator for the NorCal Bay Area FRC regionals.
Jacob Rothfus
Jacob is an Alumni of Westlake Robots and participated as a student in FIRST for 7 years. He is finishing up his degree in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin with a focus on data science and cloud computing. Jacob started mentoring for Westlake Robotics back in 2020 when a group of students reached out about a Robot Scouting System he created as a senior on team 2468, and he has been working with the team ever since. Jacob is currently working as the CEO of an Austin tech startup, Real Life Data, where he channels his passion for making the use and application of data accessible to everybody. Jacob attempts to also pass this passion for data analysis off to the students he mentors.