Team 4201 Outreach Summary
Spreading the FIRST message and promoting STEM education:
Our work with the summer camp, founding of school engineering chapters, community service, and mentoring of young future engineers at the Innovation Academy have all been effective in spreading the FIRST message. Our members established NSBE (National Society of Black Engineers) and SWE (Society of Women Engineers) on campus, and arranged speakers from Google, JPL, and SpaceX. Our students went to the NSBE Region 6 Conference and SWE hosted the film Girl Rising on world-wide female education. More than a third of our team are female.
Helping other FRC and FLL teams:
We’re fortunate to be located on the same campus as our sister K-8 school, the Da Vinci Innovation Academy. As a team we have worked extensively with the young children in our community to get them excited about engineering. As engineering aficionados ourselves, we understand that it is important to introduce young children to engineering at a young age. When asked, many children in our community say that they want to grow up to be firefighters, football players, or even movie stars, but very few of them say engineers. Team 4201 is working to change this. We have made efforts to expose children to engineering in the most fun and captivating way. Over the last three years we have been part of Da Vinci Science’s initiative to set up summer math and science camps for local middle school and elementary school kids, where they get to design their own toys and other creations. We also regularly visit the Innovation Academy, in order to mentor their FLL team and to help them with the engineering projects that are part of their curriculum. Our aim is to change the way these kids think about engineering because it certainly is fun.
We also worked with a young, creative fourth grader who wants to start his own FLL team. He immediately took interest in FIRST when he came with his father to visit our team during the weekends. We gave him a tour around our workshop and showed him our robot. He was captivated by the fact that we made a robot with our own hands and wanted to know how he could participate in FIRST.
Our team members have been assisting Dana Middle School with their FLL team since before we began in 2010. Though Dana initially had an FLL team, they became inactive after three years due to a lost sponsor. We are now trying to help them revive their team by teaching their new members everything they need to know about FIRST. From programming to making their robot design more efficient, we have been working with them on getting their FLL team up and running again. Team members also do mentoring and tutoring at Dana on math and science.
Although a young team ourselves, we have been very involved with the FLL teams in our community. At “Nature’s Fury”, the regional FLL competition, our team assisted with judging team project presentations and many team members served as referees for the robot competitions. The experience was a fantastic opportunity for the younger and older generations of FIRST to exercise its mission and core values.
We hope to be able to market ourselves more and reach out to our partner schools, Da Vinci Design and Da Vinci Communications, to find students interested in robotics. When all schools are at one campus, we hope to see the team expand, especially to work on communications, marketing, writing, website development, and outreach.
Marketing FRC to local companies:
We also try to spread the word about FIRST to the many aerospace firms who work with Da Vinci,
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