We've been busy spreading FIRST's message to anyone who will listen. We as a team believe that FIRST should be enjoyed and experienced by as many people as possible, and we've made it our goal to help spread the word of FIRST. Even though our FIRST outreach couldn’t possibly be summed up in a few bullet points, the outline below highlights just a few of the ways we've been reaching out into our local school community and the Portland community to promote FIRST’s message:

• We've run many assemblies for the entire upper school and middle schools where we talked about FIRST, Robotics, and our program and awed crowds with robot demonstrations and videos.
• We mentor five to six FLL teams to try and recruit future high school robotics members.
• We've made a lot of noise around campus with posters and weekly notices in the morning bulletin. As a result, everyone knows who we are!
• We hold weekly lunch meetings all year long which are open to everyone -- At the first one, we even provided free pizza to encourage more to come and learn about FIRST and Robotics.
• We've created a comprehensive web site to help promote our team and share information with everyone.
• Our head coach started the Portland chapter of FIRST Force (a periodic gathering of Portland FIRST coaches).
• We hosted the first annual FIRSTFare in November, and teams from all over Oregon came to share their knowledge. More information on FIRSTFare can be found here.

Adding robotics to our extracurricular mix offers students an opportunity to explore engineering and technology in a school known for its liberal arts program. Through their participation in robotics many of our students are starting to change the way they think about engineering and technology. New students who join the robotics team don’t have any electronic or mechanic experience but through hard work earning certifications and building a practice robot in the fall, they are soon caught up with team members with previous experience and are able to design and build a robot without hands on adult assistance!

High school robotics has worked very closely with the middle school FIRST LEGO league. Since many of our team members came up through LEGO robotics, we have a natural inclination to help middle school students get started in robotics. We see this as a great source of future high school members.  Each year we recruit and mentor five or six FLL teams, representing a huge percentage of the middle school. For the past three years we have hosted a regional FIRST LEGO League tournament at Catlin Gabel. Our members help organize and staff the event and create a multimedia pre-awards show.  We demonstrate our competition and test robots. Our members give talks to the 250+ students and parents about what awaits them in the high school version of FIRST. We generate a lot of excitement.

One of our favorite things created to help with outreach was a comprehensive Robolab tutorial that one of the members of the Upper School robotics team put together. RoboLab (the programming environment used by First Lego League) has been freely distributed and includes everything from simple motor operation to sub-routines. It has been used by thousands of students to come up to speed quickly on this programming language. To check out the Robolab tutorial, go to Catlin Gabel's FLL Team Download page.

Also, be sure to look under the Events section for more detailed information on the events we have hosted and/or attended this year.

We would love more opportunities to share our experiences with Robotics and FIRST, so if you would be interested in having a demonstration of our robot(s), slide show, or just some excited students talking about Robotics, please contact our Head Coach, Dale Yocum, to set up a time.