Alameda County Library Event
S. Teo
Date: 2/15/14
Time: 9:00-12:00
Members present: J. Liu, J. Chao, N. Yeap, J. Liao, S. Seo, C. Zhang, and S. Teo
For the past 2 weeks, all our team members helped advertise for our outreach event by putting up flyers. Youngju even talked to one of our local elementary schools and asked them to put flyers in their take-home folders. On 2/15, Jennifer, Jonathan, and I all went to pick up the field and arrived at Fremont Main Library at 9:00. We set up until 10 AM, when our outreach started. People started to walk in right away. We had them write down their emails and names so we could contact them about FIRST. Joshua (from Geek Squad), Stella, Claire, and Jennifer introduced everyone to FTC and the FIRST community. They explained to everyone what we did as a robotics team and the general information about our schedule. After, we had a short robot demo by Nelson and Austin. Then, we broke up into four groups. One group was the audience looking at the materials that we used to build our robot, and looking at our engineering notebooks. The second group was a Q and A session, in which a lot parents asked questions about joining FTC, or how our team managed time. Another group was helping kids to try driving the robot. The last group was making a catapult out of corks, rubber bands, and spoons.
At 12:00 we ended the session and thanked everyone for coming. After cleaning up for 30 minutes, we thanked the librarians for letting us use their room and brought our field and robot back to Nelson’s house.
The event was highly successful. Many students said that they were inspired to join FLL or FTC, and some parents even asked us if we would be at the library again the next day. We asked them all to fill out surveys telling us what we did well on, and what we could improve on. However, many families forgot to fill out the form. Next time, making sure surveys are filled out would be beneficial, as we would then be able to evaluate our success of the program.