We went to a meeting with Mrs. Abha Chauhan three teams Fiery Phoenixes, Triple A's, and H2O Megabots. We mentored these three teams on the software side of WeDo 2.o because previously, they had a limited amount of knowledge on the subject. We provided tutorials so they could work through learning the software themselves. It was an overall good outcome and we felt that the three teams developed a grasp on the software.
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Our team hosted various training sessions at USRA Meet the Field such as Connections and Configurations, Autonomous Programing, Judging and Awards, and Competition Day. We had a very good turnout and felt we reached out to many FTC teams. This event was successful for us. We were able to make an impact on 5-6 different teams from the workshops that we held. This event was also a good event for our team, as we were able to work on our robot and presentation. The one thing that we need to work on is advertisement of our events. We had hoped for a larger turn out, but did not get as many teams as we hoped. Overall, this event was a lot of fun.
This is another one of the FLL Fridays hosted by KID Museum. The goal for this event is to help every team improve in at least one aspect of their robot. We helped various teams with their robots, both hardware and software. We also helped a team with the math of moving distances. This should help them in the long run as they will have a much easier time making new missions. This event was exciting as it was fun to see kids learn and get their missions to work successfully. One thing that we need to improve on is setting up and fixing mission models. Every single FLL Friday there has been one mission that has not worked and we think there might be something wrong with the assembly. We need review the instruction and fix the mission next FLL Friday.
On November 2nd, our team went to the Model Secondary School for the Deaf (MSSD) to present to their new FTC team (Team 13792). We presented our Judging and Awards session, which covers what to expect on competition day and how to prepare for judging. The presentation includes stories about the experiences which most shaped our team, how collaborating with other teams allowed us to learn and grow, and what we did to be successful. This ties in with our mission for our FTC outreach program: to increase collaboration across the FTC community, and focus on paying FTC forward.
We started a club at Watkins Mill Elementary School. This is a Title-One school, with 78% Free and Reduced Meal students, and we want to make robotics accessible to them. At the session, we gave our presentation introducing FLL Jr. We also answered questions about feasibility of this club based on our experience with the club at William B. Gibbs Elementary School
funding. As this was a Title 1 school, they wanted to know what resources were going to be available to them. We let them know that we would be providing WeDo Kits, team meeting guides, and engineering notebooks. We want to wait until March to start the club so that the materials we have given to William B. Gibbs can be used at Watkins Mill Software - WeDo 2.0 is currently not working for William B. Gibbs Elementary School because of restrictions the school system has on downloading apps on chromebooks. The two options were to either wait until the issue was resolved or for the kids to bring in tablets, of which the second was not applicable to Watkins Mill. I will be going to the HQ of an FLL team called North Star Robotics located in Ashburn Virginia. This team has come to our EV3 training sessions and we mentored this team last year as well. They wanted us to help them out with the robot portion of FLL and practice doing a core values judging session with them.
This went very similar to our previous FLL Friday. 4 teams came to this session. 3 of the teams had come to the previous session 2 weeks ago, so we talked to them about what they had accomplished since then and what they wanted to accomplish today. We also asked them if there was anything they wanted help with. We helped them by showing them easier ways to get to missions on the field and how to make programs more reproducible. The new team that came in wanted help going straight so that they could move easily on the field. We taught them how to use port view. Another thing that we helped with is that a team wasn’t able to use the color sensor, so we taught them how to use it.
The event went off extremely well. Most of King Farm already knew us so they were familiar with our team. Since the first year our team went to the King Farm Fall Festival, there has always been a high turnout of young children, around the ages perfecto for the FLL Jr to FLL range. at the event, people were very intrigued by our robots because of their mecanum and holonomic drivetrain. Both their special wheels, and their ability to move in all directions on a plane was the focal point. Some adults too, wanted to drive our robots. One great reason for our team to attend the Fall Festival is people weren’t just there to learn more about FIRST, they were at our field and table to learn more about our team. Since we are a local team based in King Farm, everybody also wants our team to do well and succeed. Some people took business cards and flyers to follow us on this seasons journey. Because of the fact we are based in King Farm, parents that we spoke to about FIRST were interested in the fact that a team in the same neighborhood could mentor any new teams started.
Once the coaches arrived, we started by giving our kickoff presentation and gave out the registration materials. We talked about the FLL Jr. World Expo lottery. We answered questions coaches had regarding field trips and expos
Talked about the progression of FIRST programs; how FLL Jr. leads into FLL and FTC and shared our experiences in these leagues. The teams are now ready to start their seasons and the coaches were excited about the World Expo opportunity. The coaches asked if we could help schedule a presentation, and an easier way to communicate. These 3 training sessions were effective as the teams are now able to line follow, catch black lines, use gyro sensors, and create MyBlocks. This training ran smoother than our other trainings because we had expected not to cover all our material, and were prepared for this. The hands-on aspects worked well because the kids were more engaged. In the future, we should do more hands-on activities.
This was be our first event of our FLL Jr. season. We started the kickoff by giving our FLL Jr. kickoff presentation. Then, we gave out the registration materials for the season. We also talked about the FLL Jr. World Expo lottery, and answered questions coaches had regarding field trips and expos. Finally, we spoke about the progression of FIRST programs; how FLL Jr. leads into FLL and FTC.
At the event, we ran through the presentations. We had 64 people attend and we were able to impact 15 teams through these training sessions, most of which were either rookie or second year teams. We received feedback from 12 people to help us improve these trainings, and we also got positive feedback about how useful these sessions were: “I came in with limited knowledge of Block Programming, but I’m leaving more confident about teaching my team. Looking forward to more trainings from the Wizards!” One of the problems we did have was running out of time for the basic training. It took too long so they were not able to get to the autonomous portion. Due to popular demand, we will host another training in November where we can go into more advanced concepts, like using the Inertial Measurement Unit built into the REV Expansion hub.
At the event, we spent time socializing with head FTC MD volunteers, and other FTC teams. We met some teams that we’ve interacted with in the past at competitions, such as Duval Astrotigers and Green Machine Reloaded. We also met some new teams that were excited to work with us, such as Dark Matters. We talked about the game and some differences from previous years were noted. The game is very hard to set up and not having the correct setup could easily mess up our autonomous. The biggest difference this year is that there will only be an 8 second delay between autonomous and teleop. There is no warning for pinning, trapping or blocking which is easy to do in this game. Lastly, every team is required to have an on/off switch that is not built into the modules.
It was amazing to see so many teams that we had seen at our prior training sessions and other outreach events. Two of the teams had come to our EV3 training sessions and we had met Ms. Kaushika Patel, coach of one of the teams, during our project presentation. She had asked about how to get added to the FLL Maryland Slack group. We will have to follow up with her on this. Overall, the event was a lot of fun. We passed along some of our tips from FLL to younger kids and made some suggestions on their next approaches. The next FLL Friday is on October 20th, and we should see if we are able to attend.
Even though there was only 1 attendee, this event was still impactful. Mr. Vijayan was very interested in the information we presented and will be starting a team. He asked for more information about registration. We learned an important lesson that interest does not necessarily translate into action. We plan to send reminder emails to signed up attendees for future events.Our next steps include sending Mr. Vijayan information about registration and our kickoff meeting for coaches on October 15th.
This event was really fun for us because the kids were excited to learn about programming. In the future, we will have to cut down on the amount of material that we cover. Some kids got lost, and took more time than we had thought it would take to get the material, so we should account for this. For our next training session, we will take more time to review the material to make sure that the kids have grasped the concepts before moving on.
This event was impactful for me because it allowed me to help coaches avoid the mistakes that I made when I participated in my first and second years of FLL. It was also a great opportunity to meet people, like Professor G and Barry McGovern, who are the lead volunteers of Maryland FIRST LEGO League. Our relationship with them will help us educate more coaches and students.
Though going on a tour of the laboratory wasn’t necessarily about learning about something for FTC specifically, it was great to learn about a different STEM field. One of the key points that we took away is patience. It takes a very long time to make significant advances in the forefront of hard sciences. Though we have increasingly cutting edge machines, we are still limited by technology from a practical standpoint. For example, the electron microscope that we had the opportunity to see was only put in use five years ago, yet takes ten years to process the data that it collected, so a zebrafish brain hadn’t actually been imaged yet. Another point was that the simpler the organism, the more we can learn about, but as the animal gets increasingly complex, it gets harder. For example, the zebrafish are tiny animals and we can study their entire brains, however we can only attach minimal electrodes for rats. It was awesome to get exposure to this area of this science.
Overall, this event was successful as we accomplished our goals of getting at least 10 people interested in starting an FLL Jr, FLL or FTC team since we got 27 people interested! We had lots of people come by who wanted more information about starting or joining a team! Although we brought our mecanum drive robot, we didn’t bring a battery usable with the REV system, so we ended up using a USRA pushbot that we had brought with us from our last outreach event. We luckily got a robot demonstration up and running. From there, lots of eager kids came by to drive the robot. We hope to attend this annual event next year!
We are attending the annual offseason FIRST Robotics Competition event, the Battle O’ Baltimore. At this event, we will be giving three different training sessions: FIRST LEGO League EV3 Programming, FIRST LEGO League FLL Project and FIRST Tech Challenge Connections, Configurations and Coding. Below are details and summaries of each of our three trainings.
FLL 6 out of the 25 people that signed up attended. The teams and coaches who attended were either rookies or coaches with no programming experience, so we helped primarily with the basics (primarily connections). We went on to moving the robot and turning. We also discussed more advanced ways of doing these. We also discussed the underlying behaviors of the EV3 brick, which was especially useful for returning coaches who had no idea why their robots were acting weird in their last season. FLL Jr. The coaches and parents at this session were very engaged as we presented and asked specific questions about the presentation and how to conduct research effectively. It was awesome to see their level of interest and excitement. There was one coach particularly, Ms. Kaushika Patel, who was thinking about starting an FLL team of her own but she wasn’t positive, and she said that we convinced her that it was feasible and registered her team. Also, it was great to present with Sharkbait in our first sessions! They competed in FLL last season and attended the trainings that we hosted last year and provided experiences that differed from ours, so the coaches attending were able to see multiple points of view. They said they were excited to be on the other side of the presentation, as this was their first time doing something like this. Their mentor, Ms. Roberts, was appreciative of the opportunity. It was interesting to see the contrast between our first session, with 25+ people and our second, with only 2 attendees. In both sessions, the coaches were very enthusiastic, but it was a good learning experience for us to be able to adapt the same presentation to two different environments. FTC The coach of the team who brought 9 members to the morning session talked to us after the session. She loved our presentation and said that she wants to bring us to train the rest of their team. The afternoon session was much more diverse. I thought this would pose a challenge, as people didn’t know each other as well, but everyone was able to collaborate, even with total strangers. There were both adults and kids, and after the session, multiple adults came up to tell us that they were very impressed with how we presented on a technical subject, and that our session was incredibly helpful. They also said that they are planning to use our material to make sure every member on their teams are able to configure and program a robot. A rookie team sent us the below email to thank us, and let us know that they went home and were able to connect, configure, and program their own drivetrain. This was really amazing, because we were able to see the impact that we made. There were a lot of kids who drove the omni-directional robot and immediately said “I want to do this!” They brought their parents over, we talked to them about starting an FLL Jr. team at the school, and they were very enthusiastic about getting their kids into the program. However, it will be a challenge to find an adult willing to mentor the team. We made a large impact on the kids and got lots of hype for a after school club.
Overall, the training was a success, since we covered everything we wanted to, but it was not without its challenges. One was that we had was that people came early when we were setting up, and this means that for next time we should be extra early to be prepared. Another challenge was keeping all of the kids engaged. What would usually end up happening is that someone was a tiny bit behind, and then one of us would have to help them, and then the rest of the room wouldn’t focus well so we couldn’t keep the attention of the whole room. Despite these challenges, people liked the content, learned a lot, and look forward to the next training.
On May 19th, we attended an event by the Young President’s Organization at the St. Andrew’s Episcopal School. After seeing a multitude of FIRST teams, the school was interested in starting a robotics program for FLL Jr, FLL and FTC. Their science department head, Kim O’Shaughnessy, and their FTC team captain, Andy Harris, came to discuss FTC.
This event was impactful to us because we were able to help a rookie FTC team get on board for starting off their first season, and we shared some tips that would have been useful to know in our first season, since they aren’t all stated in the FIRST guides online. Ms. O’Shaughnessy signed up for our Blockly programming session on September 23rd at the Battle o’ Baltimore to learn more about Block Programming, as well as for our FIRST LEGO League session to develop the school’s FLL team. One thing that stood out to me about this event was the duration of time each parent that I spoke to spent with our team. Some of these parents were very enthusiastic about starting an FLL Jr. team, even pointing out parents who could be good coaches, and discussing other logistics with each other. There were two little girls who were waiting in line to drive Luna, and we so excited when I told them that they could build their own robot, that they ran to find their parents to get more information. Their mothers talked about how they were girl scouts and that they had heard many other troops were getting involved in robotics. After I mentioned that our team did some girl scout training last year, they asked if we could help them start teams as well.
The positive response we received to this presentation was overwhelming. Throughout each session, audience members were engaged and asking questions. One thing that we did really well was adapting our presentation with the feedback we received the night before. I think this speaks to how well our team dynamic has evolved over the summer, because I don’t believe this would have been as easy for us to do last year. We did not stick to a scripted presentation, instead we let it flow more, and the result was much more interesting and easier for people to listen to. Ironically, the information I was presenting about telling a story actually helped me with this. Our presentation moved away from presenting information that can be found in Game Manual 1, and added more insight and experiences from our team. This was well received because after the session many people stayed behind to ask us additional questions and compliment us on our presentation.
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