FTC Saratoga Outreach

On Saturday, January 20, FTC teams 4950, 7610, 11466, and 13834 visited the Saratoga Library to showcase our robots. The event was hosted by Saratoga’s team 7390, and a we were invited to attend along with a few other teams. At the library, we all set up our robots, and also displayed posters and some of our engineering notebooks. Visitors to the library were able to look around, and we demonstrated to them how our robots work. We answered many questions they asked about our program and what we do, as well as the larger FIRST organization and the annual challenge. Some people were especially surprised by how many teams our organization has. I loved the feeling of being able to explain the strong sense of community we share, and how we all work well together to do more than just build robots. Many of the younger children who visited enjoyed getting to drive around the robots and try to stack glyphs in the cryptobox.

We also had the opportunity to talk to some of the other teams that attended about their robots and organizations. When I talked to the representative from 7390, I felt none of the hesitation that often comes with meeting somebody new. Being in FTC made us a part of the same community—I could have talked to her for hours, sharing our competition experiences, trading engineering notebook tips. Later, one of our robots broke, and we didn’t have the tools to fix it. Another team found out, and with gracious professionalism, they lent us what we needed. And although I had thought about both the feeling of community in robotics and gracious professionalism before, that helped me really understand that the two are not so different after all. We might all be on different teams competing against one another, but in the end we are one big community, and that is why we treat each other with gracious professionalism, helping each other to improve. Overall, we were able to spread the word about these values as well as our club and our robots, and it was a great experience for everybody who attended.

Written By: Ishika Shah

Photo Courtesy by Michelle Pan & Shivani Sahni