Covering the Strips - Red Partnership with Harris – emphasize mentors and year round support of the team and school, PLTW…

Partnership - Harris

Covering the Strips - Black Partnership with Community - Businesses contacted through patron drive, community mentors, alumni, parents, connections to technical resources like Van Bortel Machining.

Partnership - Community

Covering the Strips - White Partnership with School - from school board (hey the Superintendent came to FLR, by the way!), to teachers to custodians…time, space to work, recognition. We wear our school colors and reach nearly 400 new students each year with the FIRST message.

Partnership - School

Bringing Strips Together Point to Emphasize! Speaking of teachers, one of our team teachers is on a two-year special assignment with the Ministry of Education in the Bahamas, we’ve helped her start two Lego teams there, and we are hoping to develop the relationship even more.

Forming the Base This is the base of the orbit balls. All of those geometric shapes remind us that our team and FIRST is based on Technology. (this is our chance to push in the Engineering Inspiration ideas) Engineering Method – emphasized as our process for developing and designing our robot.

Forming the Base Mentors – Lots of mentors!. They graduated from some top engineering schools so they can help us with choosing colleges that fit us best. They are from many different engineering disciplines – mechanical, electrical, environmental, computer to name a few. They have firsthand experience on the importance of integrating our efforts so all of the pieces of our robot work together at the end.

Point to Emphasize! Use of engineering notebooks! This year we added a Wiki – what does it do for us? (to make our notebook even more functional and accessible to the different Subteams?) Our Wiki is open to other teams now so that they can see our process for designing and building our robot. Formal integration meetings. All of the members of the team work on at least one technical aspect of the robot.

The Ring of Leadership The ring of leadership. While there may be natural leaders, our team works to have all students develop leadership skills. Point to Emphasize! Leadership Boot Camp / Development. Student leaders do…(personal story?) With the guidance of the leadership, the team starts to form.

Forming the Bowl The team is loosely formed and now we need to fill it up! Team building / Fun – Briefly show the photo of Calvin with the bowl on his head? Activities that have a purpose while being fun, Ice Skating, Egg Drop, Corn Maze

Forming the Bowl Community Service - Perspective: The students are expected to make connections into the community through community service projects. We have not developed one that we would call our own, but instead try to impact existing organizations, organizations that mean something to the students and mentors. We have favorites – Lollypop Farm, Intervol. New ones this year – Atria, Blood Drive and Food Basket delivery.

Building the Ball As the strips are woven and connected they strengthen the ball. In the same way we strengthen our team and FIRST Publicity – newsletters, media impact.

Building the Ball Rookie Team 2999

Building the Ball Demos – from big, Imagine RIT (with 17,000 people attending we got to spread the word of FIRST to hundreds and are still featured on their website.) to little Rotary Sunshine (a different impact), others depending on the presenters (maybe Girl Scouts) – a favorite story?

Demonstrations

FLL Camps, mentoring and Tournament support

Completed Ball – Our Events Rally and Ruckus – Free and open to public, helping teams