OUTREACH EVENTS
SCIENCE RENDEZVOUS
Team 865 annually attends this event taking place at the University of Toronto, the largest science festival in Canada. We have interactive robot tasks in which kids learn our control systems. They learn a bit about the mechanisms and how they fulfill the tasks of the game. We talk to teachers and parents who attend about how they can set up their own FIRST teams and what’s available in their neighborhood or home country. We also work with other robots to have entertaining demonstrations on what we can do.
Kids catching wiffle balls shot by our 2017 robot Cosmos!
Promoting FIRST and talking to parents about starting new FIRST teams!
Our driver explaining the controls of our robot!
Our head designer explaining the shooting mechanism!
ROBOSCIENCE EXPO
Orbit Robotics, team 1360 hosts an annual event called the RoboScience Expo. We set up coding challenges with Arduino LED boards to teach kids about programming, such as how it’s sequential, how to set up variables, and more. We teach the kids how to operate a variety of simple tools, and demonstrate software we use such as Fusion360 for CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) and Solidworks for CAD (Computer Aided Design). By doing this we give a glimpse of what we do and create interest in others.
GRADE 7/8 DEMOS
Students from middle schools throughout our community come to our school and get an in-depth description of what FIRST and WARP7 are about. They are given an opportunity to try driving on some of our older bots and learn about how engineering robotics has impacted all of us. We also show the basics of skills, such as programming, that could be enriched if they chose to come to our school.
WTCS Open House
At our school’s open house, we set up half of the current game’s field and mock-play out matches, performing the tasks required with our robot. Showing how our team operates and our robot performs inspires younger kids to come to our school for the opportunity to join our team.
WESTSIDE FUN CAMP
In the summer of 2019 we partnered with local summer day camp, Westside Fun to teach seminars every day for 5 days for grades 5-6 and 7-8. These seminars featured drive demos with our robots, basic electrical systems, pneumatics, design concepts and software, and more!
During the summer of 2022, we rebooted our partnership and the event to visit King George Junior PS for students interested in learning about how our robot (Avro) worked and provided psuedo driving lessons.
