Major Program Outreach Highlights

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• Creation of Adaptive Robotics program

  • Students with autism participate in a modified version of FIRST ® LEGO® League while being mentored by FRC 4645 team members

  • Designed and written by BotDogs members in collaboration with the Special Education Department at Lane Technical High School

    • The course has been approved by CPS, the third-largest school district in the nation, and is available for implementation in any district school.

• National Panel Discussion on Advancing Inclusion in Schools

  • A member was invited by Google and Donor’s Choose to be the only teenage panelist in “a national conversation: advancing inclusion in our schools,” alongside the Department of Education, National Parent-Teacher Association, and educators nationwide

  • Given a $2,500 grant for our work

• Partnered with the Chicago Girls in Computing

  • We presented to over 125 young women for an
    event called “DigiGirlz" where they spoke about FIRST ® 
    and gave a demonstration of an FTC robot.​

• Robot Revolution Exhibit - Museum of Science and Industry

  • The members of the BotDogs who were formerly on our all-girls GEMS team are featured in the nationwide museum exhibit, Robot Revolution. This exhibit features our team members in an interactive video display.

• RoboTour (2013, 2014, 2015)

  • The BotDogs organized a field trip to neighboring elementary
    schools to demo our FRC, FTC, and FLL robots and get students
    and schools interested in starting FLL teams.

  • Tweeted throughout the day and had such a positive response
    we had twice the number of schools we visited ask to sign up
    for future RoboTours

  • Now targeting low-income minority schools​

• 2014 FIRST Promotional Video

  • Sent to 477 schools, including every school in CPS

  • Featured BotDogs team members talking about FIRST

  • and how to start a team

  • Tweeted by CPS to 15,000 followers within 24 hours of its

  • online launch

  • Several hundred views in the first couple hours of
    being uploaded

• Microsoft Presentation (2014 & 2015)

• MSI Robot Block Party 2014-2016

  • The BotDogs took part in an exhibit to promote FIRST and STEM to all museum patrons

  • Demonstrated robots to kids and parents to develop an interest in robots​​

• 2015 FIRST Promotional Video

  • Sent to over 800 schools around the state of Illinois,  resulting in 10 schools immediately committing to an FTC team in 2015

  • In conjunction with our project to get IHSA to recognize FIRST Robotics, we targeted IHSA schools specifically in order to get at least 10% of all IHSA schools to have a FIRST team. This is the number of schools required to get IHSA to track FIRST as an emerging sport

• Hosted FTC Summit 2015

  • Provided 9 teams with a replica FTC competition field to work, experiment, and redesign with. 

  • Botdog members taught engineering and strategy workshops and seminars.

  • Helped FTC teams troubleshoot hardware and software problems​​​​​

• Aspire IT 2016

  • Taught a 7-week programming course to 40 5th-8th grade girls,
    many of whom did not have any prior programming experience