Hey Guys,
Team 1672 presented last week to one of the Boy Scout Troops in our town. We are thinking off possibly presenting to the middle school also. Does anyone else do presentations to different organizations in their area?
Sure, this is a win-win-win as far as STEM education, public speaking practice, and publicity. We’ve presented our robots/program to some extracurricular programs (e.g. Girls Exploring Tomorrow’s Technology), various community days, community robot and STEM expos, our school board, and many of the schools in our district (and occasionally beyond). Was there something specific you were wondering about?
In addition to presenting at all the middle schools (we are a four-town district) and at Girl Scouts / Boy Scouts, we present at all four town’s Council meetings, the District School Board meeting (they love us!), Sponsors and other local companies (including a Bring Your Child to Work day for Aim High), a few parades (this was just a big weekend), plus the high school itself. We’ll present almost anywhere someone shows an interest - 10 minute speech by 3 or 4 students, and 15 minute robot demo. Modify as necessary for time.
We’ve presented to multiple local colleges to gain support. They’ve also helped us out with various team aspects… Its weird this pops up: I have a meeting tomarrow with a teacher from my elementary school about starting an FLL team.
As Siri mentioned, presenting to other organizations is great! My team started doing presentations we call robodemos in our local community a few years ago. We’ve been to our local elementary and middle schools, the public library, boy scout and girl scout troops, other schools, town festivals, and more. The destinations change a bit each year, but it’s always a lot of fun for everyone involved, it’s great presentation practice for the students on the team, and it gets our community excited about science, technology, and our robotics program. Some of our presentations even led to the development of some FLL teams in our hometown, and the creation of new FRC teams at other nearby high schools.
Team 433 is the same way. Giving presentations is a great way, to get the community involved and to find sponsors. I love presenting because it is a fun way to share our team’s story with our community. Plus i love the look on a person’s face when we demonstrate the robot :D. Some presentations the Firebirds have given since I’ve been a presenter on the team are:
-Society of Woman Engineers; philadelphia chapter meetings
- Lockheed Martin sponsorship presentation
- American Heart Association
-Girl scout summer camps - Atena
- Our school board
-a local Mall
-a local 4th of July parade ( i guess this would be more of a demonstration than a presentation but it is still alot of fun and practice for the drivers:D)
I hope you had fun presenting to your local boyscout troop and that your middle school presentation goes well :]
My team has been doing demonstrations to organizations other than our schools for quite some time.
We have done presentations at:
Barnes and Noble and a few other businesses (basically fundraisers)
Bring your kid to work day at HR Textron (one of our main sponsors before they got bought by another company)
Open Houses at the district schools
Local/qualifier FLL tournaments (one of our feeder schools runs a qualifier tournament)
State FLL tounaments
Sponsors
Local Libraries
Girl Scouts …
In general when we run a demo we will give a spiel about the mission of FIRST and depending on our audience or demo type (we do FLL and FRC demos) we will then explain what the robot does.
Our demos to sponsors will generally be short in which we show them the robots and give a spiel about FIRST and of course thank them.
For the bring your kid to work day we ran both an FLL demo and an FRC demo. The first thing of couse is the spiel about FIRST… then explain the FLL challenge or the FRC challenge (this depends on who your are presenting to: younger kids you show FLL, older kids FRC). We would then do a demonstration of the robot(s) doing whatever the game was. After we do the that we will then if time permits/if appropriate show the other robot, let the kids try driving and so on.
At FLL tournaments. These demos/presentations will go all day and are mostly showing the kids the robot and telling them what they get to look forward to in high school.
In general we set up demos/presentations that are appropriate for the audience that will present.
You can also do presentations through videos and other multimedia forms (eg announcments) for the purpose of recruiting from schools.
Our team is trying to become more active in our community and is recruiting from the 7 district high schools and the numerous Junior high schools (for next year)
We just did a presentation at one of our schools.
Law of maximum inconvinence.
Our wifi didn’t work and we had a low battery.
Most students were interested but I’m not sure wether we’ve changed that for better or for worse.
Thanks,
timytamy
We do a lot of presentations to sponsors and community organizations throughout the year. For teams that are just starting to do this, the most important advice I can give is be professional! Be prepared; know what you’re going to say, practice before hand, and bring everything you think you might need and then some (We once had to fix a robot with a band-aid at a presentation)
Try making a presentation kit and just leave it in a box and bring it everywhere; be sure to include extension cord, power strip, battery charger, robot battery(ies), speakers for a laptop if you are doing powerpoint, basic props, business cards, buttons, and anything else you like to always present.
ALWAYS bring a tether cable… there is nothing better than running from a city council meeting to your school and back to get a long ethernet cable just so you can show off the the community! What we think happened was something with the city’s wireless cameras and wifi were messing with our communications.