Speaking Tour

It has a long time since a blog post update! Wow! Sorry about that. With the regional over, the team's activity and meetings have kind of slowed down or dwindled. That's ok. We have been pushing ahead with our Community Outreach agenda throughout April. We have presented two of the Alexandria elementary schools along with an area club.

 You really need to check out the video from our presentation at Woodland Elementary School. The excitement of the students was truly amazing. Seriously, stop reading for a minute and watch it. Awesome.

Our first presentation was at Woodland Elementary School on April 3. We made a power point presentation and planned out everything we were going to bring. Bryce, Molly, Kacy, Jenna, and Bydlon all knew their parts for speaking and demonstrating. As usual though, things did not go according to plan. Bryce was not able to leave his class early and he had the truck that Murphy rode in. So that pushed back all of our packing. That meant we left later than planned and we got stuck waiting for the train to pass through town which made us even later. We finally got to Woodland and wheeled the robots in. It was like a rock star just walked in. All the 4th to 6th graders flipped out and started cheering. Such an exciting moment.

From the point we rolled the robots in, things went really well. Bryce, Jenna, Molly, and Kacy did a great job speaking in front of a really big crowd. They explained what FIRST is, some of the things our team does, and how our robots work. The best part though was getting students up to drive the robots for themselves. Literally every single child in the crowd waved their hand when we would ask for volunteers. We went a little over schedule (oops) but that was only because of how excited the crowd was. 

Our next presentation was at Lincoln Elementary on April 13. We already had everything planned out from Woodland the week before. However as usual, things did not go according to plan. We got everything there in time. Luckily, Bryce got a box truck from his work because it was raining so we were able to protect Murphy and Rover. Everything was great setting up except something was wrong with the netbook. Eventually we figured it out but that put us behind schedule when we already had a tight schedule to begin with. 

The students energy was great though. We made a bunch of baskets and passed out a bunch of wristbands. We would have stayed later for the after school students but Bryce had to get the truck back. It was still really fun!

We continued our tour of Alexandria by presenting to the Rotary Club on April 19. They're a group of local business men and women. We have presented to them in the past and were excited to share our progress. Bryce, Kacy, and Molly did a good job of talking about the team through a slide show. We also showed off the robots. The Roatarians were extremely impressed by the team's work which was nice to hear. 

We continue our tour by presenting at Discovery Middle School tomorrow morning and Voyager Elementary tomorrow afternoon. A blog post will follow.