One of our new projects this year is with Friends of the Children, a non-profit mentoring organization for kids from k-12. We have developed short lessons teaching basic physics and robotics concepts using LEGOs. We teach these lessons through workshops at Friends of the Children to elementary and middle school students.

Partnering with a fellow robotics team, we visit Doernbecher Children’s Hospital. Young patients and their families design paper airplanes and launch them by driving our robot. We also provide DIY kits to patients as a fun STEM based activity in their hospital room.

Team 18119 is dedicated to giving less privileged people access to technology. We worked together with Free Geek and collected over 300 donations, including old computers, iPads, and printers. These devices were donated to Free Geek, where they broke down or restored the technology for reuse, reducing the amount of tech waste in Lake Oswego. 

For the past two years, we have volunteered to run the kids corner at the Lake Oswego Farmers Market. We have given away hundreds of STEM kits we created for free while also getting young kids excited about robotics. This June, kids folded paper airplanes and launched them with our robot.

All teams within the LO Robotics Non-Profit Organization demonstrated and presented their team to a variety of students. We demonstrated our robots, allowed hands on interacting and informed the students on FTC. 

STEM education is the main value we want to share with our community. We have participated in several elementary school STEM nights, allowing students to drive one of our robots and learn about FIRST. We also partnered with another robotics team to host a multi activity STEM day where students built different LEGO cars.

We love spreading our knowledge throughout our community and to other teams. We have decided to help out a brand new FTC team by guiding them through previous seasons. We have helped them through the robot design process to allow them to get a feel for how an FTC season will run.