Mentor/Team Training
Either online or in-person, we plan to have workshops for students! We will provide help for students who need help with whatever they need! The only requirements are for teams to bring their own kit and have a parent with the child while the workshops are going on. Stay tuned for any new workshops that are planned, and sign up as quickly as you can!
​
Student training
At our meetings we will be discussing how to create advanced drive bases, arms, and assemblies for competition and explain all the concepts that many of the advanced teams know. We will also provide basic examples of what the kids need to know for Vex Robotics. We will also be going over programming and how to program certain elements of the robot. As an option, we got a small course on Onshape, a Computer-Aided Design software. Take a look at the events below to register!
​
​
Mentor training
​
Last year, due to a lack of mentors, we were not able to get all the kids in a robotics team. Thankfully, from the help of Audrey and Enzo Carvalho, we now have a classroom session for those without a team and still want to participate in robotics. While they help out a ton with the kids that want to do robotics, we want to spread our knowledge and help attract more parents to become mentors for robotics team, as it can be an amazing way to connect with another group of people who are interested in technology and robotics. To help out with the mentors that might seem a little confused on the system, we wanted to help out by giving everyone tips and answering EVERYONE's questions. We will be having multiple “Mentor Meetings” to answer any question that we can, and if we cannot, we will immediately answer the question at the next meeting. We also will provide a notebook meeting for the mentors that need help organizing it.
​
​
What's the goal?
​
Our commitment to robotics was to improve the education with robotics at multiple schools. While the current enthusiasm is great at Sandpiper, we wanted to start over here in helping kids out and getting them to see the bigger idea of robotics. One of the biggest problems we had found last year was the amount of teams that lacked an autonomous program. Here's some data:
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
In the chart, you're going to see 10+ teams have not scored or even attempted to do an autonomous program. Being one core part of robotics, another idea that was missing was functional robots. A lot of the robots we saw at the Sandpiper Robotics Tournament were Vex's basic robots that could be built with an instruction booklet. This is not meant to be a push down or a taunt, but more of a wake-up call that at Sandpiper, robotics education is clearly not producing promising results. While this can still teach robotics, Students can't see the full picture, but with an experienced mentor, a lot can get done!
​
​
We truly want to help everyone learn something new and something meaningful, as our mentors had taught us years ago. The program is run with Rien Gupta, Kevin Li, and Rick Taylor as the leads for the program, and emails will be sent to help teams. Schedules for meetings will be released 2 weeks after the Kickoff Meeting. Hope to see you all there!
