Hi all,
Since the window for submission is closed, I figured that we’d post our Chairman’s Award Essay. The essay was largely written by a rookie member, aided by a few of the older members for fact checking. I’ve rarely been as proud as I am today. I would love your comments.
FIRST® Team 3337, Panthrobotics, was founded in 2010 by a parent concerned with the lack of choices for his two sons to gain STEM experience during high school. In the beginning, our team was a small set of students with few goals and few ideas as to what being a FIRST® team would entail. Knowledge came with experience; experience came with trial, error, and large amounts of support. In last three years every aspect of our organization has become more robust: our team members have become more inspired, our community more involved, our partnerships more active, and our passion for FIRST® more evident. We have seen this growth accomplished by developing a unified vision for our team. This vision can be summed up in our core values of family, excellence, and outreach.
Our family is formed from unique relationships between students, mentors, and partners. We are the first FRC team established in the Baton Rouge area. Our school is a Title I public school with an 80% poverty rate where club membership traditionally runs low. In this environment Panthrobotics stands as a beacon for change. Over the last three years we have grown to be the largest non-athletic team in the school, attracting students from all walks of life through innovative school-based outreach events. Each year we reach our 1200 member student body through multiple lunch and open-house demonstrations and by hosting a car-smash event during our school football games. Each new member finds a place in our family as veteran members partner with and train them in various areas of our team. Our family stays active throughout the year through Laser Tag Lock-Ins, in-school Robotics Lunches, and picnic meetings that help us remain passionate about our values and about FIRST®.
We believe that our core-value of family is best expressed through diversity. Our team boasts five different nationalities, ranging from Indian American to Venezuelan, and women make up 40% of our team. To promote gender diversity, we partnered with Louisiana State University to bring young women from our school to the Women in Technology Careers Forum. There, they participated in a career fair and networked with women in advanced STEM careers. This has led to a rise of women in leadership positions within our team and has resulted in our current president being a woman.
Though our team is relatively new, our alumni have already seen great success. 100% of graduates have pursued further education. Of these, 70% have entered a STEM field and 58% have pursued engineering. Over 75% of our graduates have returned to FIRST® as mentors. Our two oldest graduates, both with scholarships, have maintained above a 3.95 average in Mechanical Engineering at Louisiana State University and one will intern at ExxonMobil. Our upcoming 2013 graduates have also received accolades, one with a full scholarship to Columbia University’s Engineering Program and one with a scholarship to Louisiana Tech in Engineering. For a team founded in a school with a 72% graduation rate, these statistics are astounding and would not be possible without amazing mentors.
Our mentors are the backbone of our family, providing support, training, and counseling throughout the year. Since our first year, with a mentor base of three, we have seen a marked increase in support. Our family now has twelve mentors. They come from our parents, alumni, business partners, and university partners. One partner, LSU’s Department of Engineering, even subsidizes and trains our mentors through its STEP Program. Recently we have implemented our Design-Review Experience where interested professional engineers are invited to take part in our kickoff and subsequent design review with hopes that they will return as full-time mentors in future seasons.
We would be unable to maintain our family without a strong partner base. Currently, we have 15 partners. This includes 9 long term sponsors that have supported us for at least 2 years including ITT Technical Institute, ITI Technical College, Albemarle, Moates.Net, Commercial Realty Trust and others. These partners provide more than just monetary support. They have also provided us a build site for the last three years, space for our off-season meetings, and ITT recently hosted our kickoff in one of their technology-enhanced classrooms. Red Jacket Firearms has provided over 40 hours of on-site training in machining and MIG and TIG welding. We have shown these partners our gratitude by creating specialized plaques, holding yearly open houses, demonstrating at their sites, and inviting college partners to recruit at our school.
We believe that excellence in FIRST® is more than just winning competitions. Excellence comes through Dean Kamen’s mission to spread FIRST® throughout the world. To that end, we have founded and currently mentor one FRC team and five FLL teams. We offer technical assistance, field elements, and parts to every FRC team in our area. We also provided our expertise as judges and field volunteers at our local FLL Qualifier. To further expand robotics within our school system, we partnered with our local school board to obtain a grant for $100,000 to develop yearlong classes at 3 middle schools. We also raised $10,000 to start two yearlong electives at our high school where aspiring Panthrobots learn engineering design skills.
As well as bringing the vision of FIRST® to schools, we have also made inroads to the business community in our state through the development of our Business Outreach Initiative. Through this initiative we engage businesses throughout our state, motivating them to support FIRST® teams in their area. To this end, we presented to over 100 engineering executives at the Louisiana Engineering Society Luncheon, and to business and government executives at J.C. Penney’s Grand Reopening. We have been invited to attend the Louisiana Technology Council’s first annual STEM Gala in early March where we will demonstrate our robot and host round-table discussions with hundreds of technical industry executives. Finally, we have been featured in The Baton Rouge Business Report, the largest business magazine in our area with a readership in the hundreds of thousands.
Our Government Outreach Initiative was created to demonstrate the importance of FIRST® and STEM learning to government bodies and officials. We have met the mayor of Baton Rouge, our school board representative, and our parish superintendent. We recently discussed with the governor’s education policy advisor how to better integrate robotics throughout the state. We will also be presenting to the State Board of Education on March 5th of this year. Having recognized the significance of Agricultural Robotics to our state, we spoke with the Agricultural Commissioner who taught our team about the various applications of robotics in farming. Finally, at our request, the Governor of Louisiana has declared a Louisiana Robotics Education Day for each of the last two years, demonstrating to everyone across the state how much robotics can change a community.
Our final core value, outreach, explains our passion for reaching our community beyond the education, business, and political arenas. It brings vitality to our club, and is a necessity to furthering the spread of FIRST®. Over the last two years we have demonstrated to over 1000 elementary students from five different schools through our Impact Tour, teaching them the importance of science and mathematics and how the field of robotics pertains to their lives. We held two classes in partnership with LSU’s Education Department where thirty students learned the principles of robotics building and 3D design. Finally, through our Ambassador Program, we have recruited a fourth grade student who has worked as a team member for the last three years. He has learned how to program, design, and build while bringing his experiences back to his own school.
Public demonstrations of our robot have helped to spread the excitement of FIRST® to our community at shopping malls, grocery stores, and special events. Through these demonstrations we have our community buzzing about robotics, spurring many media appearances. These include local televised news appearances on three stations, an on-set interview on a local morning show, radio appearances, newspaper and magazine articles, and numerous internet publications. Our most exciting media interaction was working with the Discovery Channel’s number one rated show, “Sons of Guns”, in which we partnered with AndyMark and Cross The Road Electronics to develop a robot for an episode of their show.
Panthrobotics has also participated in activities to support those in need in our community. We were honored to walk in the annual Baton Rouge Autism walk, showing our robot to many children struggling with autism spectrum disorders as well as selling t-shirts to raise money for autism research. We also handed out Autism Support ribbons during both the Bayou Regional and Lonestar Regional in 2012 and were amazed to see how many people were touched by this disorder. This year, when we learned of Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital’s desire to start a video game center for sick children, we created our first annual Video-Game Uproar. Over 250 video games and 10 game consoles were collected for the hospital.
By adhering to our core values, we have become a robust team capable of winning regionals, exciting others about STEM, and revitalizing our community through FIRST®. As we grow, we will continue to incorporate our core-values into every area of our team. We will grow our family by becoming more diverse, more community aware, and ultimately more successful in attracting support for FIRST®. We may have started as a group of students who did not know the difference between a relay and solenoid valve, but we are growing into a family that knows how to show unity through diversity, victory through persistence, and maturity through service.