Island Lake Elementary School has an annual science fair for its students. This year, we knew a few FLL teams who were doing demos there, so we decided to add FTC to the mix. Island Lake’s FLL program got us started in FIRST seven years ago and we love doing anything we can to give back to the school. This demo also aligned with our recently-defined outreach focus, which was to expand FIRST within our school district.
After setting everything up, we did a quick presentation about what FLL was all about. We also invited science fair enthusiasts to our table to learn about FTC. Some of them had heard of FTC before, but didn’t really know what it was or how to get involved. We gave everyone business cards and ran Stacy’s scissor arm for those who were interested.
One particularly fun part of the evening was when Rose and Nancy took advantage of the new phone control system and drove Stacy for a few laps around the gym. This succeeded in drawing eyes and they stopped a few times along the way to answer questions and direct onlookers to the FTC table.
This demo was a lot of fun because not only did we introduce FIRST to students and parents at Island Lake, but we also got to see a lot of our old teachers. They were all very excited to see us and impressed by the amount of work we put into Stacy. We will definitely be making this demo an annual event and we can’t wait to find more opportunities to promote FIRST in our school district.
