We are an award-winning FIRST Robotics team. We seek to impact young adults by cultivating skills in engineering, programming, marketing, teamwork, and leadership through FIRST competitions. At the same time, we hope to educate and inspire people in our community about the wonders of science and technology.
Our team is in the heart of New York City, a melting pot of different cultures and backgrounds, and we reflect that.
We are diverse, culturally and socioeconomically. Over 75% of our team members are immigrants or first generation Americans. Together we speak 20 different languages and have 23 different countries of origin. Our school is a Title 1 school––over 50% of our team qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. We have members coming from all five boroughs of the city.
While our team has faced difficulties, we have accomplished amazing things. We've recently revitalized our school’s technology department; we've collected over 1.5 tons of food and volunteered over 4000 hours of community service this year alone. We've started four teams––in Cyprus, Rwanda, Norway, and Turkey also this year alone. We want everyone to have the same opportunities as us, especially if they are at a disadvantage.
My Project
After Hurricane Maria, our school wanted to help out students in Puerto Rico. Since robotics is so important to us, we decided to see if we could help them start teams or offer our support to teams on the island. We made contact with the FIRST affiliate there, whose goal is to have an impact on STEM education by eventually having 100 Lego League teams on the island. We suggested that we could help them attain this goal by mentoring teams via Google Hangout or Skype and communicating with coaches through What’sApp. In the spring, two of our team mentors met with directors of some of the schools on the island, who were very excited about our offer and said that they would feel more positive about starting teams in their schools knowing that they would have our help throughout the year. During the summer, the FLL affiliate has been able to obtain grants to start 10 new teams in Puerto Rico.
We have committed to mentoring these 10 new Puerto Rican teams this year!
While we have mentored FLL teams in New York City, mentoring from afar would be a very different experience. We thought that it would be essential to the successful mentoring of the Puerto Rican teams for us to be able to create the same robots that each team is building so that we can troubleshoot any problems that arise. Since our school participates in FIRST Robotics Competition, we build industrial-size robots for our competition. FIRST Lego League is a very different competition. FIRST LEGO League teams research a real-world problem – this year the theme is Outer Space – and are challenged to develop a solution. They also must design, build, program a robot using LEGO MINDSTORMS, then compete on a table-top playing field.
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