Diversity Day, 2013

On August 7, several members from our team had the opportunity to participate in NASA’s Diversity Day. As a NASA house team, Team 254 was able to present three robots; Overkill, Skyfire, and Slipstream to NASA engineers and staff who stopped by our booth.

Andrew Torrance explains Overkill’s hanging mechanism to NASA employees.

Mani Gnanasivam, James Holden, Andrew Torrance, Namit Mishra, Nick Gunady, Jack Lee, and Chris Sides attended.

After setting up the booth, the team members fielded questions from curious onlookers. Many NASA engineers were asked what program Team 254 used to design the robot, which programming languages were used, and other technical questions. All the team members answered questions asked by the dozens of people who stopped by the exhibit. After lunch, the members demonstrated Overkill’s frisbee and hanging abilities. Andrew Torrance explained multiple times to the crowd the the rules of last year’s game and Overkill’s scoring abilities. After presenting, we packed up and relaxed at the lab.

Afterwards

PR Update

This week we went to Diversity Day, and had an open lab for freshman to attend. Both were huge successes. At diversity day, we had approximately 100 people stop by to see the robot, as well as many who got to play with it. At the open lab, we had about 60 people attend, 24 of which were incoming freshman. We set up five stations for them to attend, all lead by our leadership team and senior team members. We had Machining with Mani, Louis, and Cory, Driving with Aaron and Abhi, Building with Nick (Eyre) and Kyle, VEX with Jonathan Chang, and Programming with Richard. Everything went smoothly and we’re looking forward to the oncoming year.

Summer Wrap-Up

We had a very busy past week, with two outreach events/demos. On Wednesday, we had a Diversity Day event at NASA. We had a great turnout. Thank you to everyone who attended. We were able to show a lot of people our robot and many were impressed. A picture of us demoing the robot is below.

Even bigger news, we held our first Freshman Lab Day on Saturday, where over 60 incoming freshman and their families came to the lab to witness robotics first hand. It was an excellent opportunity for the incoming freshman to see if they want to do robotics before they even start school (Robotics: +1, speech and debate: 0). It was an awesome recruitment event and everything went well. Since it was such a success, we will be having more of these events in the following years. A picture is included below of Vex Leader, Jonathan Chang demonstrating a vex robot to a group of freshman and their parents.

That said, we had a very successful week and an excellent transition for our 2012-2013 season. Our first meetings will be on August 22nd and 23rd. Both of them will be held afterschool in Sobrato Theater. Please be there by 2:50 so we can start promptly. Both meetings will be the same. ALL RETURNING MEMBERS MUST ATTEND. If you cannot attend any of those two meetings, please let Mrs. Roemer know immediately. These will be introduction meetings, where we will talk about the team and the rest of the school year. If you do not attend, your membership on the team will be up for consideration. This is one of the few mandatory events we have throughout the year.

We make mandatory events, because they are integral to the development of the team. If you ever cannot make it to a mandatory event, please let a teacher know immediately and they will discuss it with you. All information after ANY meeting will be posted here on the blog under its designated category, so make sure you check here daily. In addition, and just as importantly, it is necessary that you check the blog on a daily basis. Every time you open up Facebook, think about opening up the blog. That is how you will stay connected with the team, and know what is happening.

The leadership has been preparing all year for the beginning of the year and we are alle very excite for this new year. See you all on August 22 or 23rd. Welcome to the 2012-2013 robotics season.