HOME DEPOT
KIDS DIY WORKSHOPS
The Home Depot Kids Workshops are free classes, specially designed for kids, where they can build a different project every month and take it home for free.
Once a month, from May through August, the Automatons volunteer at these The Home Depot-sponsored workshops. At each event we help register workshop participants, hand out build kits, and then assist any kids that require help with the construction of their project. We also perform a robot demonstration, pass out FTC literature, discuss FTC and FLL and also allow the kids to drive our robot. At the conclusion of each clinic we help the Home Depot employees clean up the work area.
CITY OF BUCKEYE
SUMMER RECREATION PROGRAM
The City of Buckeye Summer Recreation Departments puts on a fun summer program for local kids. They asked us again to come out and participate in their STEM day activities this past summer. We had the opportunity to bring our robot out twice to their program and share with kids in grades 1 to 8 the fun of robotics, the coolness of FIRST and how they can get started in the Lego league right now!
The City of Buckeye offers an action-packed summer program from May to July. Children will participate in daily activities such as arts and crafts, games, sports, guest speakers, cooking projects, STEM activities and much more! The children will experience new things while making new friendships.
CITY OF BUCKEYE
SPACE ADVENTURE AND INFLATABLE PLANETARIUM EVENT
What better way to end Summer Reading than to turn the entire Coyote Branch Library into a "Choose Your Own Space Adventure" program. We joined the City of Buckeye where kids had the opportunity to sit through one of four inflatable planetarium shows, learn about asteroids, have fun with Civil Air Patrol hands on activities, look through and learn about telescopes, play in Mission Control, professionally record their oral history of "Where were you when..." or what they thought space travel will be" and of course meet our team, learn about robotics/FIRST and drive our robot!
CITY OF BUCKEYE
APOLLO MOON LANDING 50TH ANNIVERSARY PROGRAM
The City of Buckeye Library Departments centered their summer reading and library events around a space theme highlighting the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo's trip to the moon. We were excited when they asked us to be a part of their activities and help showcase a Space and STEM theme. In July we attended their "A Universe of Stories to Celebrate Apollo Moon Landing 50th Anniversary Special Program". We brought our practice field and introduced kids to our robot, team, robotics and let them drive our robot! Other activities included a flight simulator, live feed of the moon, games, and the chance to record your story as to where you were when we landed on the moon and other historical moments in space.
EMILY'S
PENCIL PROJECT
We are happy to help Emily with her pencil project! Emily is an 11 year old young lady (the sister of one of our Automatons) that was trying to collect at least 15,000 pencils during the summer to distribute to West Valley schools for the 2019-2020 school year, At last count she was up to 17,000+ pencils going to 15 different schools. Go Emily! We are happy to help because even engineers need pencils!
KNIGHT SUMMER CAMP
ROBOTICS CLASS
We had such a fun time going out to Knight Academy's Summer STEAM Camp and the robotics class. In June, we assisted the course director in introducing kids in grades Kindergarten to 6th grade to our team and robot, robotics in general and FIRST. the kids had great questions about how the robot worked, how the team figured out "how" to build the robot and were very impressed that girls could be engineers as well!
CITY OF BUCKEYE
ADOPT A ROAD PROGRAM
As a tribute to a fellow scholar (Chloe Schneider) who was killed in an accident while training on her bicycle for an upcoming school Mountain Biking race. The Automatons with the help of the Maxwell family had adopted a one mile stretch of road, just north of our school on Yuma between Airport and Jackrabbit Roads in Buckeye, AZ.
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Adopting the road meant that we had committed to inspecting and cleaning up that one section of road at least 3 times a year for a 2-year period.
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We typically had met on a Saturday and spent 3 hours as a group going up and down the area to pick up any trash that had found its way to the sides of the road.
GIRL SCOUTS
ROBOTICS MERIT BADGE
The Odyssey Automatons helped to host a Girl Scout Robotics Badge earning event. Several troops from throughout the west valley attended the workshop and in conjunction with the Girl Scouts of America guidelines for the badge, the Automatons were able to open up the idea of girls being engineers and building robots to at least 100 scouts in addition to teaching them about the engineering process, getting them acquainted with FIRST and ultimately earning their Robotics Badge!
BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA
ROBOTICS MERIT BADGE
The Odyssey Automatons developed a Robotics workshop (in conjunction with the Boys Scouts of America) for boy scouts to earn a robotics badge. We provided an overview of robotics and then the scouts participated in a “mini-robot” building session in order to have a grasp of understanding robotics. In our workshops typically all of the boy scouts qualify for their badge, we have run 2 different workshops to date.
FUTURE FRESHMAN
NIGHT & ORIENTATION
We host a booth at freshman orientation in the fall and welcome in the new class of Freshman! Several scholars came by to learn about our robotics club where we also explained that we are all members of FIRST and the opportunities that FIRST offers for not only college tuition help but also on a college or job application!
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We also had a demonstration booth at the Odyssey Institute’s Future Freshman Night in the spring. This was an opportunity for the team to promote the robotics club to incoming students. We showed FTC videos, Automaton’s competition videos, discussed the team’s program and, of course, and showed off our robot.