On November 18, we hosted a bake sale in front of our cafeteria to support a growing FLL team from George Jackson Academy. Everyone from each of our three teams contributed to the bake sale by either bringing in food to sell or manning the desks. We had a large variety of food at the bake sale including crème brûlée and various cookies. We raised a lot of money during it and was able to allow George Jackson to have a great starting point in their robotics team. In fact, we had exceeded our goals and were able to get more tools for them than expected.
We helped George Jackson Academy, an elementary/middle school that has been trying to set up a robotics team, but lacks the resources. On their first visit to Horace Mann we gave them a tour around our building and showed them our robots and building processes. They also came to look at the different robots that teams had made for the FLL competition. The kids visit our school monthly and we provide them with the tools they need to help their team thrive. They were all passionate in robotics, and we wish them a bright future in their coming robotics endeavours!
Every Monday, during their free periods, members from our team will visit the Horace Mann kindergarten in the lower division and help the robotics teacher teach the kids some programming. This is very important because it is giving the kindergartners a very early exposure to programming, which is an extremely useful skill in this age of computers and robotics. Even though they are using very simple tools, it is much more than any of us have gotten when we were that young.
On February 4th, our school hosted an FLL qualifier in our cafeteria and in our classrooms. Due to the increase of interest in FLL, FIRST hosted 4 amazing competitions to accommodate. All of the Horace Mann Teams – FTC 9681, FTC 7890, FTC 4326 and FRC 5806 –volunteered for various jobs in the competition, including judging, queueing, refereeing, scorekeeping, and running the event in general.