Workshops in Hawaii and New Zealand

[Jeff K.]

Team 1138 with the help of the Chaminade University, University of Hawaii, and the governor's office in Honolulu, Hawaii. We are receiving help from Governor Linda Lingle, the Lieutenant Governor Duke Aiona, and Corrie Heck.

We are currently holding workshops over the course of two weeks. The workshops will cover everything from drive systems and safety to team spirit, organization, and financing.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Fpj9BY56bqU

There will be two rookie teacher, one returning teacher, and one student workshop utilizing the VEX platform. There is no cost to attend and all attendees will construct a robot to compete in our game, "Plan of Attack", which is like a mix of Billiards and Triple Play so that they can use their newly attained knowledge. We saw teachers that attended the workshops last year at the regional, and will be seeing returning teachers this year. It is very rewarding to see how much they have learned and how they want to take every opportunity they have to help their team as much as possible.

We have been invited to return next year to host third annual set of workshops in Hawaii.





After that, we will be traveling to Auckland, New Zealand. FIRST invited us to host more workshops after we hosted the workshops in Hawaii last summer. We hosted a team at the Championship in Atlanta, Georgia, and we loved our experience working with them. Over two weeks, there will be 5 robotic student workshops with over 1000 students total and one robotic teacher workshop. There will be several sponsor events to help organize the New Zealand Regional and a workshop to train the Regional Organizing Committee. The robotic workshops will use the VEX and FRC platform.

[JaneYoung]

Wow! How amazing is this?!

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by JaneYoung

Wow! How amazing is this?!

VERY!

[Jeff K.]

The two teacher workshops went very well. Many rookie teachers as well as returning teachers from the workshops last summer attended. The returning teachers that did not compete in FRC were looking for ways to incorporate VEX in the classroom or to help them in Botball. They easily picked up on Gracious Professionalism during competition and were competing as hard as they could, but as fairly as they could as well.

We are currently teaching the student workshop and have been visited by Corrie Heck.

We'll keep everyone updated on the status of the workshops.

[marcm]

The workshop I attended was really good. I can't wait to compete here in New Zealand. Thanks Team 1138

[NoahTheBoa]

We just returned from New Zealand on the 19th after 2 weeks of workshops.
We held 5 student workshops each lasting 2 days. Over the course of these workshops we gave presentations on Drive Systems, Arms & Lifts, Animation, CAD, Programming, Team Spirit, Team Organization & Finance, Strategy, and Safety. Students were divided into 30 teams and used VEX kits to build a robot to compete in a modified version of 'Quad Quandary' at the end of the second day. We taught nearly 1,000 students in these workshops. We also held 1 teacher workshop, 1 engineer workshop, and 1 mentor workshop each with about 150 attendees. In addition to this we hosted about 80 VIPs during our 3rd workshop.
We were joined by Mark Leon and Ian McEwan from FIRST. Also, Mark and our lead mentor, Nancy McIntyre, appeared on a morning show called 'Sunrise' to talk about the workshops (Video: http://www.3news.co.nz/Video/Sunrise...7/Default.aspx) These workshops went extremely well and we have received a lot of positive feedback.

[cziggy343]

great job 1138! we were happy to send one of our robots to new zealand, but its awesome that ya'll actually got to go!

[Jeff K.]

It was awesome going to New Zealand, a different culture that was not as connected as us Americans are to technology and our gadgets. They were a more natural and went with the natural flow of things, but once we had them working on the robots they were coming up with unique and creative ideas for how to pay the game. They were playing Quad Quandary with just one vex kit and were able to score several rings on the high goal! Talk about awesome!

These kids were able to embrace it and using their creativity and ingenuity like they do best construct robots in the course of two days to compete in the game competition. We had several matches that broke 100 points and they had a blast doing so. They will definitely be a force to reckon with next year.

It's awesome how this program is really changing the way people interact with technology. Most of the new pieces of technology, like iPods, personal movie viewers, and other such personal gadgets are isolating people, putting them in their own little worlds, while this program uses technology to put people together so that they can interact with one another. Simply an awesome experience to be able to share your own knowledge to help others have the same positive experience as you, one of the most rewarding things you can do.

[Jeff K.]

Here is some footage of a news interview our team's moderator, Nancy McIntyre, and Mark Leon did one morning. They talked about FIRST in New Zealand and the workshop.

http://www.3news.co.nz/Video/Sunrise...7/Default.aspx

We're still compiling footage, 70gb worth of pictures and probably another 100gb of video to make a short youtube montage video.