We presented a summary of the FLL Jr. program for interested and potential coaches. The purpose of this event was to inform and inspire potential coaches to start new teams in order effect a 7% increase in the FLL Jr community. We had fifteen parents come to the event. One of our teammate's parents was inspired to start a team for her younger daughter and one parent paired up with a parent from another school to start a team.
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We had two “booths” right next to each other. We had our main booth, which was how we interacted mainly with parents, and we had a tile mat with our pushbot and ev3 educator bot running to engage the kids and get them interested in FIRST. At the beginning, we had an official booth with all of our FIRST flyers as well as Arjun’s LED matrix shades, which hooked kids and adults who came to our official booth. The LED matrix shades also helped boost our maker spirit, because it really interested a lot of people. On our mats, we had the pushbot participating in our “block stacking challenge”, where people tried to stack last years blocks with foam grippers on our pushbot. We also had kids drive our EV3 educator bot, which was to demo FLL robots, and represent FLL.
We shared information about FIRST with the community of King Farm. At this event we hoped to inspire children to join FIRST (FLL Jr or FLL) and to sign up for our coaching and guidance sessions, so we would be able to either guide them or inspire them start a team. Additionally, we hoped to educate children and parents about the FIRST mission and goals and STEM in general. At the event, we demonstrated our FTC robot to the general public. We explained how people can get involved in FIRST activities. People had fun driving both the pushbot and Merlin. Lots of people enjoyed learning about how the robots works and being able to drive around the robot. It was really cool to talk to people about how students from FTC move onto FRC which was the main attraction at this event. Our team acted as ambassadors for FTC. We will be demonstrated our FTC robot for the general public. We talked about how kids could get involved in FIRST activities. Our goal was to reach out to about 100 people and explain how they can get involved in FIRST Robotics. Our team also led two training session: one for new FLL coaches and one on EV3 programming. About 15 coaches came out of the training comfortable with teaching their kids the basics of the EV3 programming language and able to prepare their kids for judging. We also had a good turnout of children ready to learn about EV3 programming. We had 17 coaches attend the training. From 9-12 AM, our mentors and coaches (Pankaj O. and Parvathy S.), gave a presentation on what to expect for the Core Values and Project sections of FLL. Arjun, Maanav, and Rohan provided examples from their experience from previous years. After lunch, Ishaan and the coach lead the robot portion of the presentation. They talked about how to plan a program and how to create programs in the EV3 programming language. At the end all of the coaches said that this was a very useful event for them and one even said that we could have charged more for the event! All the presentations were made public to the coaches at the following google drive:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0BzL4RSTIUNX0VTA1cnl3eXdwVWM We trained 15 girls to be able to use the EV3 programming language. We had 8 parents sign up for more information. One of the parents is coming to our coaches' bootcamp, because she liked the way we were teaching. We had 3 wizards, Arjun, Rohan, Raashi, and 2 mentors give the training, which lasted for 3 hours. We all took turns in describing our experiences from FLL, and helping the mentors in coaching. The girls were broken up into groups of 3 per robot. One of the most fun parts of this event was when the girls had a maze exercise, and they then got an appreciation for pseudocoding. At the end, the girls made their robot go forward 30 cm, play music, and back up. This could help them complete this year's FLL shark mission. When they were leaving, we got each girl one of our LEGO FIRST pins.
On September 12th, our team hosted a FIRST in Maryland laser tag event for all teams in Maryland. We had teams from FLL, FTC and FRC attend this event. Over 30 people played at the event and everybody had fun. Our team looks forward to hosting more events like this and hosting this event next year.
Our reason for running this presentation was to help educate rookie on how to prepare for a qualifier and what to expect of the event. During the 2016 Kickoff, Ishaan, Raashi, and Sarthak gave two presentations. The first presentation was in a small room with about 15 people and the second presentation was in an auditorium with about 30 people. Our presentations went very well and people came and told us that they had learned a lot. The presentation was posted on our website at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzL4RSTIUNX0N0RybmdxeGFjbVU/view We demonstrated Merlin and the FLL robots to engage the kids and parents and talked to the parents about getting their children involved in FIRST. Beverly Farms offered to host FLL or JrFLL as an after school activity and we needed to find a parent who was willing to be the lead coach. We got 25 parents interested in FLL Jr. and 9 interested in FLL who signed up to get more information.
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