This is a great community involvment project. What team is this?
Great job whoever you are! 
This is Beach Cities Robotics, Team 294, winners of the Southern California Regional Chairman’s Award. They’re a really great team, not just with their robot, but with their community involvement and Gracious Professionalism.
We’ve also allowed kids to drive our robot when we go to different demos, what better way to get the kids interested in FIRST before they get into high school. We also discovered the kids are less likely to push the robot to extremes and break it than the “grown ups”. I’m sure BCR has also gotten a lot of kids (and thier parents) interested doing this and an excellent way to promote their team.
Hook 'em while they’re young. =)
When/where/how do you hold these kinds of events? Do you do them by yourself, just advertising the event as part of like “come drive a cool robot!” or do you get permission to set up at school/community events?
(Questions are directed at any teams with info they’re willing to volunteer.)
About 3-4 years ago, our team advisor sent out some letters to area schools and groups offering for us to come and do robot demonstrations for them. This caught on like crazy. Now, each year we do 50-60 demonstrations throughout New England and get more and more calls all the time as news spreads through word of mouth.
We do demos on-campus at WPI for various groups (this week is was a SWE sponsored Girl Scout event and a Minority Affairs office “Kids to College” program) as well as, and more often, travel to schools, libraries, churches, etc to do events. Recently, we were even the main attraction of a 7-year-old’s birthday party down at Subway (one of our Food Sponsors).
I’d recommend contacting area schools and libraries and tell them your willing to bring the robot and students to talk about robotics, engineering, being a student, whatever! Give them your contact info and tell them to spread the word!
We hold demos for pretty much any size audience and usually for about 45 minutes - 1.5 hours. We do a bit at the beginning talking about engineering, robotics, etc at an age appropriate level and then entertain questions from the audience. Anyone who asks a question is invited to come drive/operate the robot and we create little challenges for them to do.
It’s tons of fun and a great experience for team members as well as the audience. If you have any other questions or things we could help with, just ask!