From the beginning of our FTC seasons, our main mission has been to spread robotics to a variety of children, including those with special needs, like autism or down syndrome.
We have been helping others learn about robotics because we ourselves think that it’s a great experience to participate in these competitions, and we want others to get involved as well.
Not only do we teach others about the basics of robotics and FIRST in general, we also help the FLL community around us. We want to encourage those in FLL to continue doing what they’re doing so that they can go on to do FTC like a few of our team members have.
Community Outreach
Since the beginning of our first season, our team decided that we did not want to limit who can do robotics or learn robotics. That’s why we reached out to a variety of kids, including those with special needs.
We started a program called Robotics for All, where we teach kids with special needs about robotics. We introduced this program to the Down Syndrome Association of Northern Virginia (DSANV).With the help of the director of Down Syndrome Association of Northern Virginia, we held three workshops during this season, which were a huge success. It had positive feedback from parents, the kids, and the director. We were all honored to work with the DSANV, and plan to work with them and similar organizations this season.
Besides working with the DSANV, we have helped a few rookie FLL teams, two of which were out of state. We helped these teams with any of the problems that they faced with their robot. Also, we volunteered at an FLL Competition at George Mason University where we had a few roles such as judging and scorekeeping.
We then have held FLL and FTC presentations at Frost Middle School. The students at Frost had shown a lot of interest towards FTC and FLL, and we plan to again reach out the middle school. After this we displayed our robot at the FRC District Program Corner at Hayfield, Virginia.