Fall term has begun for VERTEX! We’ve been running many of the events we planned in the summer.
This year, we’ve continued our tradition of visiting the Harris Family Children’s Center, a local preschool for community members. We’re running workshops there on a biweekly schedule. We’ve covered all sorts of STEAM topics with the kids, including explorations about density, engineering structures, and design.
We are happy to announce that Phillips Exeter has decided to expand the robotics program by adding two new FTC teams. Our team, VERTEX 15534, is excited to work with them in the coming year!
We’ve also started collaborating with our local elementary school, Main Street School, to develop an FLL team and curriculum. Our first two visits consisted of robot demos with over seventy-five enthusiastic second graders (based on their suggestions, last year’s robot shall be renamed CleanBot 2000!)
We are continuing to work with Girls Who Code at the Wiggins Memorial Library, where we teach ten middle school girls the basics of python programming and introduce them to the STEM community.
Our sexy outreach team.
This term, we launched our podcast: Sum of Our Parts! At Sum of Our Parts, we host monthly episodes where we chat with robotics experts about their paths to engineering and work today. We developed a funky jingle and recorded our podcast trailer as the summer faded. We chatted with our first professional—Ms. Ashley Reisig—an engineer at Southwest Research Institute. Our conversation was incredible: Ms. Reisig was enthusiastic and shared many exciting details about her projects. Ms. Reisig has designed and built elements of NASA missions! We’re planning to upload our first episode within the week 😊
Last Saturday, we held a booth at the Boston Children’s Museum CreatedBy Festival this term. CreatedBy is a Boston area maker fair during Mass STEM week! This allowed us to connect with other members of the New England FIRST community and representatives from companies such as Autodesk and Mathworks. The visitors had a lot of fun driving our robot and making BristleBotsof the parents who visited our booth seemed incredibly interested in what students can learn from FTC. In addition, members of a local FLL team are excited to get into FTC after checking out our robot!
Making bristle bots in Boston!