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Outreach
Our team believes that engaging with and impacting our community is important in teaching others about STEM! Here are some of the outreach events we have organized and participated in during this competition season.
Here are some of our Outreach endeavors from our 2025-2026 season!
Delkor systems
We toured Delkor Systems in Arden Hills. We learned a lot about engineering as a career and how you only need a 2 year degree to work at most engineering places. We learned about how bright and clean they keep their space, how they use robots in the packaging industry, and how something as simple as putting a product in a box with a robot takes a lot of work and thought. We learned about how they use vacuum suction to lift and package products, but they need to be careful and use the right amount of air pressure. We also learned that there are multiple different colors of loctite - red = high strength/permanent (light red for smaller things and darker red for bigger things), blue = medium strength/removable, green = high strength wicking/permanent, and purple = low strength/easily removable.
Concert In the park
Our team helped set up a booth for a North Branch robotics demonstration. We welcomed kids to ask questions about our program, drive robots, and gain familiarity with FIRST. This is our best event for recruiting new mentors.
All girls class visit
We reached out to our 4th-grade all-girls class and talked about the importance of STEM/robotics. We gave a slideshow about how robotics works, the benefits of it, and how they can impact the world with engineering. This event took place during the school day at our Elementary school
State fair demonstration
We shared our knowledge of our robot and previous seasons with others to educate them about FIRST opportunities at the State Fair. Throughout the day, we encouraged kids and parents to drive our robot and ask questions about how it was made. At this event, we were judged by the State Fair, and our robot achieved 1st place. Along with demonstrations, we participated in the State Fair's parade and allowed teams to showcase robots using “robots on a stick” all 12 days of the Fair. This year our team won the Grand Champion ribbon for the FTC robotics.
Over a series of 7 Mondays throughout July and August, we taught 3 classes each day to kids in grades 2-6 in our school's summer daycare program. Each week, we taught them about a scientific concept and then did a craft that related to it because their theme for Mondays throughout the summer was make something Mondays. These topics and crafts taught kids about gravity (tensegrity structure), robotics and prosthetics (robotics hand), kinetic and potential energy, (popsicle stick and spoon catapult), Gravity, Drag, Air Resistance (parachutes), Flight, Weight, Lift, Thrust and Drag, engineering process (hoop gliders), Animation, Perception, Optical Illusions, Apparent Motion (flip books), and the engineering design process (paper plate marble mazes).
Almelund Apple Fest
North Branch has the opportunity to park cars and do demonstrations at the annual Almelund Apple Festival. Throughout the day we directed cars to the appropriate spots and took entry fees. After the day was done, we donated $100 to the owners of the field as a thank you for letting us use it. We parked 180 cars per hour.
Calls around the world
We engaged in virtually meeting with FTC teams from all over the world such as, Indonesia Australia, India, Alaska, Vietnam, and many others. We discussed strategy, design, outreach, and so much more!