pic: The President meets MOE

[Mr MOE]

First off, a HUGE Thank you, goes out to all of the FIRST personnel, who made the Washington DC visit a success. MOE 365 worked most closely with John Marchiony, Chief Marketing Officer, and Carol Kauffman, Regional Director. It took many people to organize and execute this event.

MOE's day started with a bus ride to DC on a gorgeous blue-sky-and-sunny day. We took a short walk to the Capitol where we had some photos taken. We then joined other FIRST teams being recognized, FVC 3053, "Occam's Engineers" from Mendham, New Jersey and FLL 1677 Access 9" from South Bend, Indiana for lunch at Union Station.

Then it was off by bus to the White House. MOEzilla and the FVC and FLL bots needed to be in DC this past Friday for security inspections. The bots spent their weekend in an office not far from Laura bush's office.

After meeting up with the FIRST delegation, led by Dean Kamen, Woodie Flowers, Paul Gudonis, John Abele, and Dave Lavery, we had about an hour to wander freely around the Cross Room / Grand Foyer, Blue Room, Red Room, Green Room, East Room, and State Dining Room. These are awesome rooms with many Presidential portraits and great views of DC out of the windows. We took loads of photos.

We spent about 30 minutes getting our large MOE group organized for the photo with the President (Thanks, Carol Kauffman!!!). He only spent a total of less than 10 minutes with us, so everything had to be timed and efficient. As you can see in the photo attached, student team members wore MOE jerseys and adult mentors wore business attire with MOE green highlights (ties, scarves, jackets, etc.). We spent about 10-15 minutes working with the White House staff to determine if and when we could do the MOE cheer.

The President finally arrived after a brief meeting with FIRST leadership. He was very friendly and down-to-earth, admitting his incident with a Segway within minutes of our interaction. First were the photos. At the end of the photos, we did the MOE cheer. He was supposed to be ready for it, but the amplification of the sound in the room caused him to jump. It was great.

After that, our Chairman's Award presenters (Andrea, Will, and Eric) described what our team has done to earn the award. Our competition team (Matt, Morgan, and Kevin) then grabbed a keeper tube and drove the bot over to the President. In the fun photo that is on Getty, the bot stops short of the team. The students are looking up because our arm is raised and is literally inches away from the bottom of the "very expensive" chandelier that Dave Lavery mentioned. Our driver got inches away from hitting it two times. Needless to say, our team and the White House staff were holding our collective breath.

The President then got a chance to take control of our arm/gripper controls. He collected a tube, raised the arm all the way up, and (with help from Morgan, our arm driver) released the tube on the top spider leg of a mini-rack we built for the event.

Andrea Agra, our Team Captain, then presented President Bush with a MOE jersey with "Bush" printed on the back.

The President was very congratulatory of the teams and what FIRST has done to further the interest of science and technology in our youth. He also was impressed with the level of technlogy FIRST robots in general contained. Though our brief interaction, he seemed very genuine and friendly.

Many photos were taken of the event, but video and audio were not allowed. So, the best you can hope for are the fun photos that are being posted and some other stories.

It was a terrific day. Thanks FIRST.