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Hi Friends! It's me again. As most of you know, we hang out at Gateway College's FabLab quite a bit. This last Thursday we helped out at their Sumobot competition. It was a great day & very inspiring. It got me to thinking about the possibility of forming our own robotics team.

Teams from various middle schools & high schools came. Some schools had multiple teams there, each with a robot they designed.

There were 4 events:

Presentation - Presenting your design & your team's notebook to a panel of judges.

Driving - Each robot needed to navigate a given path by remote control.

Unique Challenge - Each year has a different challenge. This year they had to take a hat off a statue & place the hat on a table.

Sumobot - Getting your robot to push the other robot off the platform as many times as you can within the timeframe.

All of these robots used Vex robotics pieces.

Teams work best in groups of 4-6.

I felt like this was extremely doable for our kids, other than affording the kits. They're not cheap. I'm in the beginning stages of pricing things out, but I'm thinking a few grand for a team to have what they need to build a competitive bot.

Here's my questions:

1. Is there anyone with kids who would sincerely be interested in a robotics team like this?

2. Would you prefer this as an enrichment class or outside of enrichment?

3. We'd have to look at getting sponsors and/or doing fundraisers. Are you in?

4. Are you in a position to help? I am certainly willing to help, but I don't know that I can take this on single handedly.

IF this became an enrichment class & IF we were able to raise the funds this Summer, we could do 1st semester learning to build a bot of any design & focus 2nd semester on building a bot foe competition. There's obviously a lot of IFs right now. I'd mainly like to guage interest & see if this is worth pursuing. It will take effort to get a robotics team off the ground, but I think it's doable if a few of us band together & I think it could be worth it. 🤖