Gale
Chairman’s Video 2017
FIRST FRC 5837
Unity4Tech
2017 Chairman’s Award Essay
A Waterloo, Iowa based FIRST FRC High School Robotics team housed in the East Waterloo High School tirelessly drives to achieve their mission supporting Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)
Our team, Unity4Tech is founded on two sets of goals: three simple words: include, inspire, and implement, along with our goal to “Work for TiPS: Together in Promoting Success.” We are comprised of students from our area high schools, members of local FTC teams, including surrounding towns. Since our team is made up of students throughout the Cedar Valley, we are able to expand our reach from not only one school but to multiple districts. Along with extending our reach, being made up of FTC team allows us to transfer our lessons learned to FRC. In comparison to our first year, we have expanded and revamped our previous outreach events in order to drive the message of FIRST to our community. To top it all off, we have expanded our sponsorship and fundraising in the direction of becoming a sustainable team.
Outreach is the difference between just building a robot and changing your community. Outreach is what takes this program of building a robot and competing to the next level of innovators and problem solvers. One of the biggest events we have hosted is Cedar Valley Robot Rally in the Valley. We presented a proclamation to our mayor to declare the week last week in March “Robotics Week”. Along with the declaration, we had demonstrations from FTC, in the form of team 9968 Cross Fire, along with local FLL teams. This allowed us to show the other programs of FIRST what FRC is. We even were able to have an FRC team from China in attendance. We are planning to make this a yearly event in order to retain students interest in FIRST, along with introduce new interest.
In the past both our FRC team and the FTC teams that we are made up of have always attended STEMFest, this year we organized all the FLL, FTC, and FRC teams. Our goal was to show the full spectrum of FIRST and that students, no matter the grade, have a program open to them. Since the FLL regional was also the following Saturday, we found it was a great opportunity for all of our local FLL teams to present at one of the largest STEM events in our area. We even had fields for them to practice on.
Culture Fest, one of the other main events we attend every year. In the past we have always been the only technology based booth there. This year, we are planning to bring more FIRST teams in order to demonstrate the importance of diversity in STEM. Although it is one of the smaller events we attend, it is one of the more important ones. We want to show our community that your background, race, or religion does not decide what you can and cannot do with your life.
Our latest outreach event was a free showing of the new film Hidden Figures at our local theater. We also invited other FRC teams to follow our model in order to promote the powerful message behind the movie. Along with the movie we partnered with NSBE, SHPE, and SWE; we demonstrated our 2016 FRC competition robot along with one of our FTC team’s robot. We explained the parts and design of the robot featuring CAD. Following the movie, we had a discussion about the importance of diversity in the ever growing STEM field. Despite a freak ice storm we had the night before, 75 students and 25 adults were in attendance. We now plan to replicate this event during our district’s conferences in hopes of better attendance.
Our outreach to our local FIRST team was also much improved over last year. We had restarted the FTC team 4626 based out of Hudson. After restarting their team, we invited them to join our FRC team. One of the students from their FTC team, is now our programming captain. This allows us to reach outside of just our school district and directly spread our message across cities not just schools.
A new FRC team, 6455 Code Collective, was also started this year in our city’s Catholic school, Columbus. Being the Rookie All Stars at the very first Iowa regional, we took the time to teach them what FIRST is about. We helped them with the software element of their kitbot, helping them get it up and running. While doing this we met with some of the other students to talk about what it takes to become Rookie All Stars; giving them a few pointers on a few issues that we experienced last year and how to reach out to the FIRST community for help.
Since we have a background in FTC, we took some time to help teams with programming during league competitions. We noticed this was an aspect that seemed to be a challenge for many younger teams. We will also plan to invite FTC team members to come to our build space. That way we can show them how we operate, as well as a crash course into CAD and programming. Some of our very own members have been FLL Mentors for our local teams. Every elementary school in our district has a FLL team and every middle school has a FTC team. Our job is to ensure all of these students continue to move up the FIRST programs and retain their aspiration for STEM.
Going to college is a far fetched thought for many students in our district; in order to implement our practices into the world, college needs to be a given for our community. Half of the K-12 students in our district are a minority and two thirds of our students are receiving free or reduced lunch. On average, 80% of our students are capable of free or reduced lunch; in order to be eligible, the household income has to be less than $20,000 + 7,000 per child. For many of the families that make up our schools, college seems like an unrealistic goal. On top of that, we have students with 45 different languages. With these challenges, our goal is make college a reality for 100% of our participants. In the new age, a college degree is almost required for a sustainable job, which is what FIRST is after. This includes the new generation of innovators, the team that will cure cancer, the brains behind the Mars landing. College is the first step to achieve these goals.
There were many seniors in our program last year and most are pursuing greater education. To start our alumni, we have Akina, she is currently pursuing a degree in agriculture at Iowa State University. Another one of our alumni is Leo, he is pursuing a degree in Film and Arts at The University of Iowa. Semir our senior from West, is studying criminology at UNI. Lastly Hunter who currently holds a job at Omega cabinetry. This years senior class is comprised of two women, who both plan on pursuing a degree related to STEM.
One aspect that is a very unique aspect about team is our diversity, we believe that there needs to more representation for minorities. Last year, we had eight mentors from John Deere, two coaches and a graduate assistant from UNI. This year we were lucky enough to gain another mentor from John Deere. Not only are our students diverse, our mentors are diverse as well. For instance we gained another female engineer as a mentor, providing our female students another person to relate to.
We take the idea of the idea it is not just about building robots to the next level. We make sure to set aside time for team bonding through potlucks and team dinners. Any all day work session includes a home cooked meal provided by one of our students, getting away from the pizza stereotype. We even celebrate coach, mentor, and student birthdays! We value our inter team relationship, the best way to work together as a team is to truly be a team. With the diversity of our team, this teaches important life lessons about looking past race, religion, or background in order to work together. Which is something that can be applied directly to life and is a much needed quality in today’s day and age.
We continuously work to resemble our motto “We work for TiPS: Together in Promoting Success”. For our team, this means that we are able to strive to do things that appear to be impossible. Looking past ourselves into the realm of possibility, and formulating a plan to create
the solutions for accomplishing our goals. Speaking of goals, we have three; Our short term goal is to build a competing robot, our mid term goal is to win a berth to worlds, and our long term goal is to inspire more people within our community and beyond to embrace STEM. In order to achieve our long term goal of engaging the Cedar Valley community, we have reached out with events such as the ones previously mentioned.
Everything we have talked about is not possible without funding. If we did not have sponsors, there would be no outreach, no learning, and the most important part, there would be no team. Coming from the district that we do and with the funding we have, becoming a self sustainable team is one of our top priorities. Last year, most of our funding came from John Deere, and we are very appreciative of that. However, John Deere cannot be the only main contributor. Besides John Deere, we did have many other smaller sponsors such as Denso, Fastenal, General Sheet Metal, and Magee Construction, just to name a few. These were all material sponsors though, this year we were able to increase our monetary sponsors within the first week! One of the FTC teams we are composed of, 5445, bought a 3D printer; in order to thank all of our sponsors, we will be printing a model of their choice for them to display. This makes becoming a sponsor of our team more exciting, as well as an incentive for the team. The more sponsors we have, the more prints we are able to make, meaning more people will see our team, making them wonder how they can help. We are always looking for help of any kind.