Lighting the Flame

This has been mentioned many times before but one of our team's main goals for the year was to expand the awareness and knowledge of our team in the community. We have been doing this in a variety of ways this year. We had a video game tournament, visited classrooms, visited local area clubs, presented to our sponsors, created many social network opportunities, and performed at a halftime show. We continued our efforts on Friday when we visited Discovery Middle School and Voyager Elementary School. Click "see more" below to read about how the day went.

The group that has been doing a lot of the presenting has been Bydlon, Bryce, Molly, and Kacy. Jenna has been along on many of them as well but she was on vacation. With all of the visits and presentations our team has done recently, the packing up and tearing down of our equipment goes by very quickly.

The team headed over to Discovery in the morning to present to Mr. Holmen's engineering and programming classes. We presented to two eighth grades classes and one ninth grade class. The presentations went really well. We talked about what FIRST is, what our team does, and the robots that we build. In the the ninth grade class, the engineering class, we focused a lot on how the build process works and the challenges we faced and how we overcame them. After talking a little bit and taking questions, we went out into the shop area and let the students drive the robots. The team members had fun showing students how to drive and the students had fun driving the robots (especially Rover). The ninth grade students used Murphy to play 500 in the shop as well.

During passing time, we took Rover out into the hallways to drum up interest. Check out the video here. 

After finishing at Discovery, we stopped at Subway and ate some lunch. While eating, we charged all of our batteries and laptops. It was a pretty funny sight inside Subway. We had the robot in the back of Bryce's truck which got quite a few stares as well.

Our next stop was Voyager Elementary School where Brandon joined the others. We presented to all of the fifth grades classes first and the sixth graders second. Both grades were very excited when they came into the classroom. Unfortunately, the gym was being used so we couldn't present in there. This limited Murphy's abilities. We used the team laptop to present which made it nice to show some videos of the competition. We emphasized how much fun school can be and how great math and science are. After talking for a little bit, we answered A TON of questions from students which was fun. Then we let some people drive the robots. The energy of the students is so contagious and the team members really fed off of that. We were sad to leave when our time was up.

When the team made the goal of expanding our awareness and spreading the word of FIRST to the community, I don't anyone on the team had any idea just how much we would do. Days like Friday where we get to spend our time getting students excited about academics, science, and engineering is incredibly fun and rewarding. Who knows, maybe in 4 or 5 years, some of these students will be going back to where it all started for them and lighting more fires? The team can only hope so.