Make money for your team, have fun, help the planet.

[ebarker]

Kell Robotics was honored along with 7 other groups at the SeaWorld/Busch Gardens Environmental Excellence Award ceremony April 21,22,23 in Tampa Florida.

A video produced by SeaWorld/Busch Gardens media is posted right here.

A delegation from our team was there 3 days, 2 nights, all expense paid. Air and ground transportation, Embassy Suites hotel, food, parks, & entertainment.

The day we arrived the Adventure Island water park closed at 5:00. At 5:30 our get acquainted party began. We had the whole park to ourselves. Two dozen students, a dozen chaperones, and four or five dozen park employees. Music, food, pirates....arrrg

The next day we fed the animals, toured the park in the day, and in the night (when it is closed) we had dinner at the awards ceremony with Jack Hanna. And then we went and sat around a fire circle in the darkness chatting with Jack, surrounded by the animals on the plain. Yes there was a fence !! And then Jack handed us $ 10,000.

Please listen everyone !!!! - It is very difficult for a typical school group to combine robotics with environmental conservation. But YOU are not a typical school group. You are a FIRST, VEX, or other robotics team. If you want to combine technology and robotics with something like environmental conservation you are better positioned than anyone on the planet to take advantage of this opportunity.

YOU can take skills and knowledge you have learned in your robotics competitions to do something like we did and earn a place at the EEA, promote your robotics program, promote FIRST (or other group), help the environment, get the coolest vacation in the world, and $ 10,000 on top of all of that.

You can think of the EEA as being like the Chairman's Award of student environmental stewardship and scientific research. Plan on a long view, a lot of fun, and a lot of work. But I can guarantee you it is definitely worth the journey.

View the pictures here

[Carolyn_Grace]

This sounds pretty cool. How many people did you have on the trip? (mentors? students?)

[DonRotolo]

Wow, 10 grand! The good things you could do with that...

[ttldomination]

Wow, your team is really setting a standard for, not only GA Teams, but teams everywhere with your immense amount of outreach into various robotics arenas.

Good Job!!!

[ebarker]

There are 8 winning groups from around the country. We like to treat them all equally, but the reality is some are a little more equal than others. If you watch the video you can get a feel for how it lays out. 3 of the 8 are featured. The 1st girl on the video is on our team and you see her several times throughout the video with teammates.

Only 3 students from each team plus 1 mentor/teacher is allowed. That makes 24 + 8 = 32. Of the 8 mentors 1 and only 1 is selected to be the NSTA SeaWorld Busch Gardens EEA educator of the year. That is an individual $ 5,000 prize. The women on the video won and that is why she is being filmed.

So when we went to the water park there were the 32 students and adults, plus a handful more, plus maybe 50 park employees taking care of us. The whole park all to ourselves. The whole park !! At Busch Gardens the next day we had to share the park with the public but attendance was light. It was after spring break and before summer.

I absolutely cannot encourage you enough to do something like this.

It will expand support for your FRC program because it helps the public understand the value of FIRST. It will improve your team's income because your fundraising model becomes more 'mission driven'. It helps the environment. And it drives recruitment. Students join our team faster than we can graduate them or run them off. Not only do students get excited about robotics but they feel like they are working on something important that goes beyond themselves and beyond the team.

The money doesn't hurt either. We will use the $ 10,000 to expand and operate our outreach programs beyond our normal team budget. The students and mentors have been working on a long term strategic plan so that when these windfalls occur we can capitalize on it and make a lasting impact. Next year you will start seeing the impact of this planning and uptick in funding. For now we will keep you in suspense ..... OK, Actually 1/2 the money is going into long term communications projects.

edit: Anyone reading CD knows that I say 'strategic' a lot. Strategic planning is what got us here. Driving down to the dome I gave our students a printout with the awards earned by all the Championship Chairman's teams going back 10 or so years. I told them to scour the data for patterns. Without exception the answers was - "most, but not all, most CA teams won the KPCB, then the EI, then the CA". As Sherlock Holmes would say, "it's elementary my dear Watson". You need a good strategic business plan with mission focus to drive your teams results.

Ed