In order to give back to our community, we acknowledged that all students should have equal opportunity to explore FIRST.
We have connected with and paid several visits to The Child’s Way, a daycare center for medically fragile children, where we helped young disadvantaged kids learn about FIRST through FLL robots. We displayed different FLL robots and showed them robotics is fun. This outreach helped us commit to the first part of our plan, to inspire disadvantaged groups and communities.
The Child’s Reach Initiative:
During our visits to The Child’s Way Daycare, we realized many special-needs children lack fine motor skills and that prevented them from interacting with their learning tools which have small buttons. Speaking with the Center’s Director Ms. Stanley and the learning specialist Ms. Church, we offered our help and initiated this project to remove the barriers these kids face every day in their learning environment. Repurposing the sensors, servos and controllers we used to build competition robots, and CAD designing and 3D printing parts, our project involves large-buttoned, sensory-considerate learning tools and interfaces that we will donate to the Center.
This is our way of giving back to our community with what we learned from FIRST robotics.
Although we work hard with our available robotics parts and components to develop prototypes, we will need industry assistance to spring this initiative to reach other disadvantaged kids. Please consider sponsoring our efforts with grants or in-kind donations. See Corporate Sponsorship opportunities.
Child's Way Daycare Visit
CAD concept of the interface
3D printing of interface
Testing the servo and potentiometer
Prototype with replaceable challenges
Students are testing out our prototype at the Child's Way Day Care Center
