My students need extruded aluminum parts and bearings to build our school robot.
$687 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
Everyone who knows industry knows technology is the future. To promote technology as a possible future career for our kids, we decided to try building robots for competitions. My students come from an area where there is limited employment. Robotics can help build a love of STEM jobs in my students.
Our school district is one of the lowest income school districts in the country.
Most of the students in my robotics program come from poor families in high unemployment areas. As a teacher in this district I am challenged daily to get the kids seeing anything in their future, except failure and unemployment. Since the future of employment in our country will have something to do with technology, and as a way to promote technology to our students, we started a robotics program. With very limited funds and and almost no materials to build a robot, we started the team.
We are in our second year of being involved in the FTC Robotics, and we have yet to win a competition. It is hard to motivate kids to stay involved in something where they see loss all the time. And unfortunately for our team, it takes funds to be able to build a successful team. I have donated as much as my wife will let me to purchase what I can, but there is still a lot we need.
My Project
Even though my kids are poor, they aren't lazy. Over the course of last year they raised about $200 by recycling aluminum cans. Using that, combined with money I donated to the team (and what we could beg, borrow, and steal), we have built a pretty decent robot chassis for this year's competition. Now we need to build a top end for the robot. When we get these extruded aluminum parts and bearings, we will use the materials to build what we need, so we can compete with the more wealthy schools around us. Every year the competition changes. We have to design, build, and program our robot to accomplish a different activity every year. The materials we are asking for will be used to build the robot to accomplish what is expected of us. After this year's competition, we will tear the robot down and re-use the materials to rebuild the robot for future competitions. The materials should last our team multiple competition seasons.
By helping us to become more competitive, you are helping kids who see nothing but poverty and unemployment every day to see a chance to get out and become something.
If we have a winning season we will draw more kids in to the team and start to really have an impact. Nothing would make me happier right now than to see kids get more interested in robotics and technology and look into engineering and physics as a possible future. It would help them and all the kids see a possible future. Thank you
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