Does it just mean showcases?
Outreach is anything you or your team does to get your team, or your teams mission, out into your community and beyond.
This can be anything from, as you suggested, showcases, or much more. Putting posters up in your school about is outreach, as you are reaching out to your community, advertising robotics as a sport, and gaining recognition for it. Outreach can mean going to science fairs and showing off your robot, or just volunteering to help! Some teams even host summer camps for younger students to learn about robotics.
Outreach can be whatever you do to spread the mission of FIRST: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. If you are increasing visibility, great! If you are actively teaching, awesome! If you are supporting community events under your team name, outstanding! Anything you are doing to spread your team, FIRST, and your collective goals, is outreach.
If you have questions about a specific outreach effort you were thinking about, I’d be happy to help you decide if it would be a good outreach event for your team, or help you decide if it is relevant for any awards.
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I was wondering what counts as an “outreach event” because a lot of teams talk about how they’ve hosted for example, a fifty outreach events this season. Does this mean doing showcases for schools and fairs or does it even include volunteering for an event?
I’m not sure what you mean by “count,” because outreach really is anything you do in order to spread the mission and vision of your program and FIRST. In terms of FIRST awards, though, there are some definitions (updated again this year by the Hall of Fame committee) that define commonly-used “outreach” terms. This helps us standardize these terms so every team is on a more equal playing field (i.e. in the past, there were several “definitions” concerning what it meant to “start” a team, but now it’s more clearly defined). So, even though this is technically specific to the Chairman’s Award, it’s a good idea to use these definitions for all communication within FIRST to help standardize. See the following link: https://www.firstinspires.org/sites/default/files/uploads/resource_library/frc/game-and-season-info/awards/2020/frc-chairmans-definitions.pdf
I’d be happy to talk to you more about the subject if you’d like! My inbox is always open, you can email me at [email protected] (I don’t always respond to CD messages in a timely manner)
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