Recently we had a great opportunity for an outreach event at a robotics workshop with manufacturing businesses in our county. We were only able to get 2 volunteers to go and so we didn’t actually have enough students to meet all of the business or have enough that felt comfortable speaking in settings like that. For reference there were 50ish business people and a small exhibitor area.
The two students who went did a great job but thinking about it after the fact we didn’t really have much of a formal plan in place of what to say. We had a flyer and they know about the team but we didn’t talk about the best ways to communicate to the exhibitors and walking up to a stranger at a workshop type scenario.
So… What does your team do to help students prepare for speaking outside of FRC environments? Everyone has training for talking to judges, but what about talking to a large group of adults in a business workshop? Maybe teams that have lead talks at FRC conferences or outside events could give some inputs? What about speaking with a group of politicians or a school board? Any input is gladly welcome and thank you in advance!
We’ve done a fair bit of outreach this summer and have what we consider our “standard show”. I’m a grey haired mentor with an abundance of…er…gravitas. I start out, mostly because FRC is not well known in our area. I tell them what FIRST is. We get the specs and quickly design, prototype, fabricate, program and prep in…(points to students for their line) SIX WEEKS. You need to overcome the notion that FRC is little plastic stuff. We then cue up the game reveal video while asking the audience how their high school selves would have solved it. I turn it over to the students then and they explain how they did it. Time permitting show a few matches and for sure drive the robot around a bit and invite all concerned to come up and have a close look. Grab some game pieces, sometimes we nab other things too. It works pretty well. I’ve got the flyers and cards although to be honest much of the business end of things comes in the after visit thank yous and such. pm if interested in a longer summary. Oh, we try to string together several visits in one day. Heck, if you gotta trailer a robot and assemble a demo team make the most of it. We’ve done three in one day. If you count two sites for one company I guess we did four once…You can do this with as few as three students if you have kids who can handle a mic. Make sure you convey the true size of your team. While I’m doing my bit - its about 5 minutes - slide show of fun robot images plays including full team photos.
I specifically work with kids on public speaking, although we are fortunate to have three or four who are naturals. I always include at least one on our visits. There are lots of ways to improve spoken communication even in these nonsensical cellphone times…
