Our Outreach:

Outreach is an enormous part of our robotics team, as at our team we believe in so much more than just building a robot. Whether it be furthering our own knowledge by interacting with the STEM community, both nationally and internationally, or spreading STEM to others, it has been an enjoyable and informative process that has lead to building friendships and having experiences we wouldn’t normally be able to.

Reaching the STEM community:
We have reached many robotics teams internationally via calls (reaching over a dozen), using Instagram to reach out and this has provided immensely valuable information to the team, whether it be robot design ideas, portfolio help, or even strategies for upcoming competitions. We have found that these calls have been a very fun experience, for example, we contacted the national winning robotics team of Lithuania and had a very insightful call with a team much more experienced than ourselves as of course this is only our first year competing.
We also have coming up trips to Shotoku robotics to discuss our bot and more juicy robotics details, we also have plans to visit Adastral Park, an experimental robotics research facility which we are all excited for.
Furthermore, we hosted a recent scrimmage, an occasion to see where other teams’ bots are up to and discuss design ideas, getting out the arena and giving the robots a chance to practice before the real thing.

Spreading robotics and STEM:
We have done a workshop in a local primary school to show off our current bot to try and impress and hopefully inspire the youth. Additionally, we have more plans to do different workshops in primary schools in the area, such as helping the students make bristle bots! Small robots that glide around the desk with the help of vibrating motors, that’ll be decorated however the students like, with pipe cleaners and googly eyes!
Another key part of our work in spreading robotics skills is by mentoring the team of our neighbouring school, we have been able to help them greatly by providing guidance on all topics, such as CAD, building tips or their outreach too as whilst all teams are in competition we believe in the fundamental value of co-opetition; that we are all like minded individuals and should work together to succeed as a whole.

Overall from this we’ve learnt a lot about robotics from calls internationally, and felt the impact of working closely alongside other teams and furthering our own robotics knowledge.