At the 2012 Championship Chairman's Award Winners round table conference some of the teams suggested finding a problem in your local community that the team could help with and work on setting up a program to solve the problem.
Some examples of RCA winners and their "innovative methods" include:
- Demoing at an art gallery and showing that robots can be used to make art, if you build a small robot it's easy to dip the wheels in paint and let the kids drive it over paper. You can go around the middle school summer art programs and see if they'll let you demo as well.
- Demoing at the Girls Scouts Centennial event, The Great Girl Gathering, at the Mall of America in MN. A group of girls from FRC 3630 showed off their 2011 robot and talked about being women on a FIRST robotics team. They impacted over 1,000 girls.
If you'd like to PM me I'd be willing to look over the 2012 Chairman's paper, executive summary, anything you have from the presentation, and the Judges rubric they gave back to you in order to help your team brainstorm some outreach events or help you submit. I've worked with three RCA winning teams the past two years and interviewed quite a few more.
You can also check out
www.assistingcreativeenergy.com for more tips/resources on Chairman's.
Renee