PMMC Meeting 11/6

 The PMMC Meeting today went great!! We brought 10 team members and Bydlon to present. An incredibly wide range of topics was addressed. You can see the presentation here.

Bydlon Beard On

Today, the team started the Bydlon Beard Off fundraiser. We are going to have a table out during lunch every day this week. Students and staff can donate money to the Robotics Team. When they donate, they can choose which beard design Bydlon will shave (mutton chops, goatee, clean shaven, etc.). If we reach $300 total, Bydlon will shave his beard on Friday. So we brought out Murphy and drove it around to get attention to our fundraiser.

After school, we met again. Tomorrow is a PMMC meeting. The PMMC is one of our major team sponsors. Because of all the events our team has done this past month, 10 students are coming with. We practiced the presentation at the beginning of the meeting. After that, Bryce did an AWESOME job cleaning out the Robot Room. Kacy and Bydlon worked on Robotapalooza. Team 3313 will host West Central MN teams on December 1 for a fun filled day of hanging out with robots. We are really excited about it! So Bydlon and Kacy drafted an email to regional teams. Carson worked on posters. Allen and Dalton created another Java programming tutorial.

Fair Play

As usual with our team, we never have just one event in a day. It has to be two or three... The team always stands up to all the excitement though and provides a great experience at each event. The team presented at the Club Fair, visited our big sponsor group, the PMMC, and had a team meeting.

The Club Fair at Jefferson High School is a nice place to show off the work we do and recruit new members. It was nice that so many of the current team members were so eager to help out and hang out at the table. We had Rover out and about driving around. Potential recruits were able to drive the robot and talk to current members about the work we do, how often we meet, and how awesome we are. We got around 10 potential names and contact information which is a good start.

The PMMC meeting went well. First, the team talked about the Homecoming Parade. Most of the rest of the meeting was spent discussing the team budget and fundraising opportunities for the rest of the year. One of our biggest events coming up is an Open House at Massman, LLC who is part of the PMMC. We are looking forward tomeeting potential mentors and showing off all of our hard work.

Lastly, the team met up after school to continue our off season work. Kacy and her crew worked on purchase orders for new parts, posters for the Bydlon Beard Off, and emails to prospective new sponsors. Bryce and his team worked on the electrical board for Murphy. Molly got some parts made over at Alex Tech. Allen and his "students" spent their time continuing to learn Java while also programming Kinect. Finally, the team reminisced about memories from last year.

Bydlon... well he was weird like always.

AAEDC Small Business Luncheon

During our monthly meetings with the PMMC (our awesome, main local sponsor), they threw out the idea of having our team be the star of a Area Small Business Luncheon. Of course, we jumped at the idea.

Bryce, Molly, Kacy, and Bydlon brought over all the Robotics Team promotional items to advertise the team. They each did a speech about what the does, what FIRST is, and how it has changed their lives. It was a great experience and even more community exposure (one of our main team goals). Plus, as an added bonus, the team raised quite a bit of money. Some pictures are included. 

Golden Horn

A full day of robotics for some of the team members. They had a PMMC meeting, then robotics after school. After school, we worked on tricking out the gatherer, making a new horn, working on the mascot's feet, and the pulleys for the gatherer.

Mid-December Update

Hello again!

Just thought we should type a little summary of the things we have been working on the past few weeks since our mini-regional competition.

• We had another meeitng with the PMMC on December 7. We presented the group with our proposed budget for the season. They generously decided to donate a large sum of money to the team. THANK YOU PMMC!!! We also updated them with all of our contact information (Twitter:@team3313, youtube: search team 3313, facebook: search team 3313, this blog page, and our gmail address team3313mechatronics@gmail.com). The last news we presented them with was a mentor profile for them to share with their companies.
 
• The main business we have been working on recently is community outreach. The past two days have been CRAZY busy with presentations. Yesterday, we went to a meeting of the Sertoma Club in Alexandria. We presented our robot and a little bit about our club. Some of the members even got to drive the robot!
• Our other big community outreach piece was going to Discovery Middle School and talking to the Engineering classes over there. We are welcoming in ninth graders this year so hopefully a few will join. It was a lot of fun showing off our base robot and just sharing what we and FIRST are all about.
• Our next BIG EVENT is a Modern Warfare 3 competition at Jefferson on December 22 starting at 10am. Should be really fun and a lot of advertising for our team.

We learn the new game and rules on JANUARY 7th!!! We are all super pumped. We will be attending the Kick-Off at the U of M Twin Cities. Only 23 days!!!!!!