This year our robotics team participated in our Greenhills’ all school service day. Members from our Upper school, and our Middle-school teams spent the day helping run our STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) themed station. This year for service day Greenhills hosted students from Maybury Elementary. Maybury students who came to Greenhills were assigned a Greenhills buddy to spend the day with, and become pen pals with later in the year. Our station worked with 75 of these pairs, in 3 groups of 25 at a time.
Students first were brought to the Junior forum where they were told the plan of the day. They then got to see the 9895 team robot for this year’s FIRST robotics game, Center Stage. Students saw the robot drive around, use its airplane launcher, and place game pieces on a backdrop. Pairs then went downstairs into the design wing, where they began the main event of our station, creating their own Elastic Energy Supercar! Using all renewable resources, these student pairs each created a Supercar that the Maybury students then got to take home! Students also got to race their cars against each other on the tracks we had set up in the hallway.
Some students who had finished early also got a chance to drive the middle school robot. These students were mentored by members of team 9895. They taught students how to drive the robot, what the game this year is about, and the aspects of the robot we are still creating. This spirited activity was both very fun for the students driving, and fun for all of us who got to watch!
This activity first and foremost served as a way to expose Maybury students to engineering, FIRST robotics, and STEM ideals they don’t see as often as we do. We wanted to pique the curiosity of all students, both from Maybury and Greenhills to learn more about Robotics, engineering, and the STEM field as a whole. We hope to have shown Maybury students the fun of engineering, and how to find learning opportunities in fun activities.
We would like to thank the Civic Education department at Greenhills, Maybury Elementary, and the members of Greenhills faculty who stayed at school on service day for making this station possible. We hope to be able to continue this partnership between our robotics teams and our school’s Civic Education department for years to come, and host this station again next year!
Greenhills Robotics 