staff: I didn’t see anything in the rules that would suggest that this would be prohibited; please notify me if this is not the case.
/begin shameless plug
tl;dr: Donate your moneyz to https://www.youcaring.com/swift-creek-robotics-enloe-robotics-554933.
Hey everyone!
I haven’t been on very often recently. That’s mostly due to my work with a FIRST robotics team - and we’re going to the world championship in St. Louis, MO over April 27th - May 1st.
As a bit of background information, FIRST is an organization that is short for the abbreviation For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. It emphasizes STEM education and awareness for students (and adults) globally.
My team is advancing to the world championship because we won what FIRST calls the Engineering Inspiration Award. The award recognizes teams that have an outstanding impact on advancing respect and engineering for appreciation within a school or community. In the past four years, the team has held summer camps, participated in various community outreach events, and helped mentor FIRST Lego League teams (basically a precursor to the FIRST Robotics Competition that we are participating in). This year, we’re planning on stepping up our outreach even more with local initiatives and advocacy groups. You can learn more about our community impact at the team’s website. I think it’s safe to say that working with an FRC team is not just an expensive hobby; it is an actual opportunity to learn crucial business skills (gotta get those grants and sponsorships), engineering concepts (e.g. understanding torque and angular momentum was critical this year), teambuilding (teams compete in 3v3 alliances during competition, which are randomly selected), and community outreach (volunteering, demos, interacting with kids, etc.). FIRST’s motto, “more than robots”, reflects how complex and diverse the FIRST Robotics Competition actually is: we’re going to worlds not because our robot placed well (it finished 27th in our district, and we eventually made it to semifinals - still not good enough to place), but rather because of our community impact.
Our team is identified as team 4828 (there are around 6000+ currently). This was our robot at the regional championship this past weekend, in which we qualified to move on to the world championship. The “Safety Always” banner was quickly added in the duration of about 5 minutes in order to prevent other robots from shooting and scoring goals.
Now, here’s the clincher: it’s gonna cost the team roughly $20,000 to get to worlds and back. Yes, literally enough to purchase a small car. It costs quite a bit to ship a robot (the crate is roughly 8x8x8 ft), and we also need buses to carry roughly 50 people, as well as lodging and food. The registration fee for the competition itself is also several thousand dollars more (this and some other expenses have already been covered graciously by NC First), which go towards covering the competition facility, etc. These are real-life, professional grade robots, built out of actual industrial grade materials, not some little tinker toy set, and the pricing for building and competing with these robots reflects that.
While many people on the team are able to shell out the $700-$800 that would be needed to get each person to the competition, there are some people on the team that need some sort of financial assistance. Also, this will be the fourth competition that the team is attending this year, so some pocketbooks are already a bit empty (each member has paid ~$200 per competition insofar to cover lodging, competition fees, etc.).
Thus, I kindly ask the players here on Project City Build to consider contributing to fund this trip, which, for most FRC teams, is a once-in-a-lifetime journey for participants on the team (our team has been to worlds one time before this year, that was four years ago, and FRC is limited to high schoolers). I know that most people on this server are probably kids/teenagers and are not earning a living wage yet, so I get it if you can’t donate. However, if you can donate, every little bit helps. If you can’t donate, it would also be great if you could simply share the link on social media somewhere and get the word out there, but there’s no shame if you choose not to.
So, without further ado, here’s the donate link:
https://www.youcaring.com/swift-creek-robotics-enloe-robotics-554933
Also, if you’re interested in STEM fields, you should check out if there are FLL (FIRST Lego League) / FTC (FIRST Tech Challenge) / FRC (FIRST Robotics Challenge) teams located near you. For more information about FIRST, you can visit http://www.firstinspires.org.
Thanks for your time.
/end shameless plug
( mind sending me some of that 10k 
) xD