WORKING IN THE COMMUNITY

We have held many demonstrations at community events. At Space Center Houston's Yuri's Night event, we demonstrated our robot for young children. We have also done multiple demonstrations at Chick-fil-A Family Night. During these demonstrations, we explain how our robot works and the importance of robotics to children and parents. We also bring our robot to fairs such as the Sally Ride Festival and Maker Faire in Austin, where we can share robotics with a larger audience. We also are building a partnership with Texas Instruments, where we have demonstrated our robot multiple times. Additionally, we attended elementary school carnivals, where we showed the robot to students. Because the mission of FIRST is to inspire interest in science and technology, we have been especially committed to working with children and to education.

FLL TEAMS

In the summer of 2008, we established FIRST LEGO League Teams at The Rice School and Lanier Middle School and are mentoring these teams throughout the FLL season. Additionally, we began mentoring the St. John's School FLL team, a second year team, in fall of 2008. Although this team was already established, we used our robotics experience to help guide them through this season. We have also held workshops to help train FLL teams. Over forty mentors and students attended one such workshop at the University of Houston. We plan to continue and expand our FLL mentoring efforts in hopes of changing students' perception of science and technology and inspiring them to pursue careers in science and technology.

HOLDING WORKSHOPS

In addition to FLL workshops, we have held workshops for FRC Teams. We held an FRC Rookie Training Workshop to help new teams and teach them things that we learned during our rookie year to ensure a smoother rookie year than ours. Also, it included information about required things such as how to pick a team name, color, and theme. Additionally, we held a CAD Seminar, during which we taught students and mentors how to design using the computer aided design software SolidWorks. We also held a seminar to show teams how to integrate Labview and the new C-RIO.

ROBOTICS COMMUNITY

Not only are we committed to spreading the inspiration of robotics, but we also contribute to the existing robotics community. In order to fill the need for a local robotics competition that would help teams prepare for FRC, we established and hosted the Houston VEX Regional Competition. In addition to recognizing and filling this need, we also saw a need to centralize team resources. In response, we started and continue to manage TXFirst.org, the main website for Texas robotics. Through this website, we provide information and assistance to teams across the state. We also run MentorSearch.us, which aims to link teams with invaluable mentors, resources, and guidance.