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2007 Outreach
Team 694's 2007 season was an extremely productive one in terms of outreach to our community and other teams. Never before has our team and FIRST garnered this kind of publicity, but we hope to improve on this precedent in the future.
We began our successful season with a wonderful book sale in the middle of September. Thanks to the compliant weather, we were able to bring out our 2005 robot, Yvette, for demonstrations right on the sidewalk, placing tetrahedrons on top of each other in an imitation of the actual competition. We also brought smaller VEX robots children could drive and enjoy. Due to the cooperation between our team members, their parents, and a multitude of other factors, we managed to not only sell over one thousand books, but also brought the world of robotics to every person who stopped in awe at the contraptions we built.
Around the time of our book sale, the TriBeCa Film Festival was underway, and we decided to capitalize on this golden opportunity for publicity by holding a demo in the family section of the event. We brought two of our many successful robots, Yvette and Joshua, and we showed the crowd Yvette's game, which was like a large, robotic game of tic-tac-toe, followed by a demonstration of Joshua's ball acquiring and launching ability. To top it all off, we fired a salvo of foam balls right over the head of the audience as an example of the power of Joshua's flywheel.
Half a month later, at Wired Magazine's NEXTFEST Demonstration at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, Team 694 became part of seventeen teams from NY and NJ that came to the four day event to show off their robots from the 2006 season. Our robot, Joshua, stuck audiences with his prowess when in participated in matches from FIRST's Aim High game.
In October, Joshua was in the spotlight again, this time at the 50th Reunion Event for the Stuyvesant High School Class of 1956. There, many distinguished alumni drove Joshua around in our main lobby, and we gave tours of the entire building as well as the Robotics Lab.
Our efforts, however, did not stop there. Team 694 participated in the Goldman Sachs Bowl-a-thon, which raised money for three nonprofit organizations, including FIRST, as well as the Goldman Sachs Birds of a Feather technology seminar. We also continued our tradition of introducing the Robotics team to the Parents Association, as well as sending team members to speak at a Women in Engineering conference.