Now that the dust has settled, and we have the official drawings, I am happy to report that Team 4130, The Blue Devils in SE Michigan will be opening a K-12 STEM Center! Our school district passed a 38.7 million dollar bond November of 2019, and within that bond included the renovation of a current wing in the high school to be used for K-12 Robotics. Attached I have the preliminary drawing for bidding, as well as the render of our new entrance.
ALSO; within this bond was an addition of a fieldhouse to be used for our decorated athletics programs at Richmond. This also allows Richmond the ability to host an official FIRST Robotics Competition District, so stay tuned for that in 2022! Any questions please feel free to reach out. I am more than willing to speak with anyone about how we went about some different items.
1 - There is not space for a practice field. We are a member of the Blue Water Area Robotics Alliance which has a warehouse in Port Huron that as a team we have 24/7 access to year round that has an official AM field boarder and wooden elements.
2- The attached drawing includes where the machines are at in the machine room. The “L” type shape was not our first choice, but is what the superintendent gave us to work with.
What’s on the other side of door 109B? Looks like a pretty good setup with lots of room to work. Having machines in their own room is a nice benefit rather than out in the open too. Where do you store your materials?
That will be entering into the programming room, which will just be a standard classroom with carpet down for basic testing. Provides them a room separate from the rest of the chaos to focus. Materials as in like raw materials such as steel aluminum etc?
Separate areas for classroom style activities is also a nice bonus.
And yes on materials, we have a small room for our mill that is connected to a large HVAC area we use for storage. Curious what others do when there is no defined area set for maintaining sheet and tube materials. The rest of the equipment belongs to our HS shop and we have a handful of tricky turns to get larger materials out to plasma cut or band saw.
That makes sense, we have a material stock organizer that we have had for a few years that will go along the right wall in the machine room. (The one on the other side of Entrance D144)
UPDATE:
Attached is the render of the STEM Center sign, which turned out awesome! A few team numbers are wrong so those are being updated but I was very happy with how this turned out.
Wiring for the new machine shop has officially begun. In the next few weeks we will be ordering shop and drafting tables, and all of the new machines. We have also officially loaded our old rooms into semi trailers that are sitting in the parking lot for the summer. When more pictures are available I will post them.
New fieldhouse is taking shape at the high school. This will allow us to host an official FiM district event in the 2023 season. Most likely an off-season for the 2022 season to iron out the details.
