Outreach

Through the Castilleja middle school Gbots program, we've impacted 2/3 of the Castilleja middle school, 120 girls. In mentoring the students, teaching them the basics of joints, motors, and rotational movement, and ultimately culminating in an interactive robot showcase. In the past our showcase has been a robotic petting zoo. We've developed significantly more interest in Gatorbotics and cultivated connections between our middle and upper school.

Gatorbotics' members teach a robotics elective to low-income girls at the Peninsula Bridge summer camp. Students experienced the engineering design cycle firsthand when they were asked to interview a person in their life, identify a problem they face, solve that problem with an engineered prototype, and present their solution to their peers and a panel of judges. They documented their process in these design journals created by Gatorbotics members, that are also available for other FRC teams to use on our website. We partnered with four other Bridge sites this last summer, adding two age groups, and impacting 250+ Bridge students by August.

This year we have started hosting pop-up events at local libraries for children ages 4 to 9 years old. These events give elementary students an accessible opportunity to design-thinking and STEM learning. Gatorbotics members design and teach the curriculum for these pop-up events. Gatorbotics members work closely with a smaller group of kids, to help them through the prototyping, designing, and presenting stages. To start the process, the students identify a problem in a friend's life and design a robot to help solve that issue. At the end of the event, each student gets to present their robot design to the group, ultimately giving them confidence in presenting their ideas.

We have recently created a partnership with the WAAW, an international 501(c)3 nonprofit in Africa. WAAW focuses on educating African women in STEM to reduce poverty and drive development. Through their foundation, they provide quality STEM opportunities, closing gender gaps in economics, innovation, and achievement. Our curriculum is being distributed to WAAW's network of 58 chapters across 21 African countries, benefiting over 6,000 women. We're also collaborating to digitize our curriculum, making it more engaging and accessible, especially for older learners, with the help of Khan Academy.

Gatorbotics collaborated with the LEMO Foundation, engaging with 50 low-income, at-risk middle schoolers to address community issues through engineering. After exploring challenges like gun violence and illiteracy, the students chose to focus on climate change. They created an interactive robotic endangered species petting zoo to raise awareness about extinction, drawing hundreds of community members to the event. Additionally, we joined forces with the LEMO elementary school summer camp, organizing activities such as spaghetti bridge challenges, experiments on Newton's Laws, and car design projects for 100 students. These activities culminated in a modified robotics petting zoo, further enriching the learning experience.

Our first Gear Up partner was Curieus, an organization that does science experiments with low-income elementary schoolers enrolled with the Boys and Girls' Clubs of the greater Palo Alto Area. We had about 100 students sign up for our Curieus partnership class, 50 in each semester, where we made coffee filter parachutes for toy soldiers to teach pneumatics, TinkerCAD holiday ornaments and rockets to teach them about design, logos and websites to teach kids about branding, and so much more. All of this was accomplished on Zoom during the pandemic, so while all of the materials we used in our lessons were low-cost, household supplies, we organized a COVID-safe materials pick-up at a local elementary school to ensure families didn't need to spend a dime on our class.

Starting in the fall of 2021, we incorporated robotics into the curriculum of the Halford Young Women Leaders Program, which provides mentorship to high-achieving, low-income 3rd-5th grade girls, most of whom live in East Palo Alto. We've led Halford lessons on making paper circuit cards for an important adult in their life, mechanization, and motors. We've begun developing a pipeline from Halford to our Castilleja Middle School and the MS GBots robotics program, and ultimately, to Gatorbotics as well.

We partnered with the Shanghai No. 3 Girls' School to start the first all-girls robotics team in China. In 2013 and 2014, we hosted a delegation from Shanghai of five girls and two teachers for nine days, where they attended a regional FRC competition in San Jose and participated in our robotics and programming workshops. In subsequent years, Gatorbotics has continued to provide remote mentorship to them as they launch their robotics program.