Outreach Programsince 2018
Mission
Our team has been constantly increasing our presence in our community and across larger stages, which includes expanding our outreach. Our program’s outreach focuses on two aspects: community and sponsor outreach. Our mission statement is to foster a generation of leaders and innovators with an emphasis on equal opportunity for all. Our sponsors have also introduced us to new outreach opportunities.
Team Structure
Starting in April 2018, our club established the outreach team, a group of members from FRC who organize and lead all outreach opportunities and events. By running outreach through a team of students instead of one individual, we have the opportunity to increase our impact on the community.
Initiatives
In 2022, we expanded our program to actively mentor 7 teams in all aspects of FIRST ranging from gracious professionalism to how to build a shaft and pinion with lego bricks. This FLL mentorship program also acts as a feeder into our middle school robotics program, and eventually, our high school robotics teams. In 2023, we expanded our program to Saratoga Elementary, the third elementary school in our district and are now actively mentoring 17 FLL teams.
Every year, our program displays our FRC robots at the Saratoga Rotary Art Show, an event that many parents and children attend. This is one of the main ways our program notifies the local community of what we’ve built and how we have improved over the years.
Our team regularly visits our sponsors (mainly Festo, Intuitive Surgical, Apple, and KLA’s Robonanza) to thank them for their support and to update them on our progress for the current competition season through robot demonstrations.
During the off-season, our teams visit local elementary and middle schools to give robot demonstrations. Our purpose is two-folded: to introduce STEM early to young students and to recruit members for future years. In fact, many of our current members developed an interest in robotics due to these robot demonstrations when they were in middle school.
Hosting back-to-back FTC and FLL tournaments is a critical part of our community outreach. While the event benefits FIRST, this effort also promotes STEM to students and the community by introducing them to the exciting and valuable experiences of robotics.
From July 30th to August 3rd we worked with City Team at their Mayfair, San Jose location to teach small groups of middle and high school students. A 3-D printed car project and a Mini-Robot build workshop were taught. Students in the 3-D printing workshop learned how to use a very basic CAD software called Tinkercad. They used Tinkercad to design a car that was then printed and presented on the last day of the workshop. We are currently working with City Team to start a virtual tutoring program and a FIRST Lego League or FIRST Tech Challenge Team.
As the co-founder of the NorCal GoBabyGo chapter, since 2018 we have collaborated with AbilityPath, a physical therapy organization in Burlingame. We are modifying rideable toy cars for mobility-impaired children to help them take control of their mobility. So far, we have modified 19 cars and had 4 build sessions, impacting almost 20 children. We have also expanded this initiative to work with a local Sub-Acute Care Facility for children who are dependent upon oxygen tanks and feeding tubes and are working on adapting the cars to their individual needs. We are currently working on an app to improve mobility virtually for physiotherapy sessions.
Working with Vikalp Sansthan, an organization that works to reduce child marriage in rural India through education, we have created 60 educational videos in math and English. Since the start of this initiative, we have expanded to other like-minded NGOs, including Shadika, an organization that provides resources for college-aged students, and the WeEducate Foundation, which supports victims of sex trafficking. More recently, we have expanded to the One Billion Literates Program by modifying our videos for teachers in rural Bangalore.
We worked with 7 other California Teams to co-found the California Association of STEM Advocacy with the goal of advocating for spreading STEM and allocating increased funding for STEM programs at the state level. In 2023, CASA held its second annual in-person advocacy conference for Californian robotics teams invested in making STEM more accessible, abbreviated as CALC (california advocacy leadership conference.)
At the 2022 Houston World Championships, we met the Tigres team and they were interested in our Vikalp initiative. We kept in touch and discussed how we could collaborate to teach English to students in Mexico who do not have access to a high-quality English education. So far, we have around 15 completed videos that teach conversational English.
In 2021, we worked with Blackford Elementary school, a Title 1 school, where children from low-income families make up at least 40 percent of enrollment, and Santa Teresa Library to hold a series of virtual workshops to teach kids, ages 5-11 about science with materials they could find at home during the pandemic. In 2022, we expanded this curriculum by rebranding the initiative to “Library Science”: the in-person version of “Home Science Experiments”, and mentoring 7 workshops at Cambrian Library, Saratoga Library, and Morgan Hill library, affecting about 200 children.
At our farmer’s market, we explained how Manta worked to all customers, described our club and robotics opportunities in FIRST, and explained engineering classes at our high school, raising awareness about STEM and robotics in the community and garnering more interest in robotics from young minds.
We hosted a program to help Scouts BSA troops 581 and 582 get their Robotics Merit Badge. Through our arduino curriculum, we have designed an affordable means to receive their badge, furthering our mission. Additionally, we created a curriculum to help other local Boy Scout troops receive their Programming Merit Badge.