We participate in community outreach in many ways with our community. In previous years we have displayed our robot and team at local elementary schools STEAM nights and community fairs, including Issaquah Salmon Days and Issaquah Farmers Market. Additionally, we bring out t-shirt cannon robot to multiple school events and involve ourselves with our local community. Our team also organizes an annual Saints Engineering Robotics Camp over the summer to inspire STEAM in elementary students. During the 2020 season, we pioneered a successful camp called Saints Online Learning Experience.
Community Outreach is all about us giving back to and involving ourselves with the community.
Interlake SOLE
Interlake Saints Online Learning Experience is an Online program where Saints Robotics members teach incoming 1st through 5th grade students the foundations of programming using Scratch.
One of our missions is to inspire students to pursue careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). We actively promote the development of STEM in our community through various activities and events.
Here is a link to our playlist of the Interlake SOLE curriculum.
Interlake SERC
Interlake Saints Engineering Robotics Camp is a physical camp that runs for a week for incoming elementary students in our local community. In this camp we would teach the basics of engineering by using EV3 robots. At the end of the week, students would be challenged to an obstacle for their robot and would present these to all the parents.
We have hosted this camp 9 times as of 2019. Because of the pandemic, we could not host it for the 2020 year and instead developed an engaging and impactful opportunity for students virtually via Interlake SOLE (see above).
FIRST Outreach
Our team engages in a number of activities in our community in order to promote the vision and message of FIRST. We expose the wonders of FIRST to various students that would otherwise not have the opportunity to experience robotics. We continue to try and broaden our outreach programs in parallel to our growing and maturing team.
STEAM NIGHT EVENTS
Our team hosts numerous events to promote STEAM, ultimately to encourage more students to pursue STEAM-related majors in college. These events are done outside of the FIRST program, and are our team’s attempt to spread STEAM in our own ways.
Fundraisers
In the past we have hosted many science-based fundraisers to promote science and technology in our community. We have also hosted fundraisers as Applebee’s just to engage with our community. Other fundraisers our team has had include the FLL scrimmage, where we assist local FLL teams in the area as they prepare for their competition, concessions that we hold during the FLL qualifiers, and sessions of SERC and SOLE.