At the beginning of the academic year our team worked with BYU professors Teri Bateman, Randy Lewis and a team of engineering students to launch the International Education Initiative in Granja Porcón, Peru. We researched, chose, assembled and sent over 300 catapult kits to BYU- Provo where the Global Engineering Outreach team will distribute them amongst the Peruvian elementary schools. We continue to partner with the BYU Global Engineering team and are working to plan a follow up project.

We planned to travel to Peru alongside the BYU team, however due to COVID restrictions, we were unable to travel. We plan to travel with the BYU team during our potential follow up project.

As part of the International Education Initiative, we needed funding to finance the costs of creating and shipping the packages to Peru. We decided to hold a car wash fundraiser jointly with the other two Hanford teams to raise money. We were able to raise enough money to fully fund the project (over $700) , and we also had the pleasure of meeting a STEM based company from Oregon!

Hanford Robotics volunteered at the Benton-Franklin dual county fair for 3 days to teach children about robotics and set up displays. Our work at the fair allows us to reach underprivileged and minority communities in our region (specifically young girls) and connect them with FIRST teams in their cities. We connected a total of 20 students with FIRST programs near them. We also were able to promote our team to potential sponsors after both our robots won first prize in the fair’s educational category.

 For 8 weeks through the summer, our team volunteered with a local junior science team to measure temperatures citywide in place of the research team members who did not have transportation. The collected data was then compared and sent to the Mid-Columbia Forestry Council and Richland City Council as an initiative to get more trees planted throughout the Tri-Cities and surrounding areas.

Due to our ready inclination to volunteer within our community we have seen an influx of requests to assist in various volunteer activities. In one such request, our members were asked to mentor students at Chief Joe Middle School’s robotics summer camp. 6 team members worked 2 days a week at the local middle school teaching robotics, engineering, teamwork, and problem solving skills.

Due to the sudden increase in new Hanford Robotics members, we had to split into 3 different teams. As the veteran team, 8099 started the Falcon Gold team and mentored the Falcon Flight team purchasing their FTC competition kits, and teaching them essential engineering skills to prepare them for competition day! We also continue to support Dayton’s robotics team virtually and both Richland High School robotics teams (both of which we helped start 2 years ago) by helping them troubleshoot and sending resource kits.

Prior to COVID, Hanford Robotics hosted all our league’s interleague competitions. Through the pandemic we continued this by once again hosting 2 hybrid competitions at Hanford with all the Hanford and Richland teams. Our mentors and team organize the competitions and work as runners, referees, and scorekeepers to help Hanford and other Tri-City teams to success! We plan to continue this culture of cooperation for the coming years, regardless of the obstacles we face.

This season, we sponsored our first ever 12 hour build together with 3 Hanford teams as well as the 2 Richland teams we support! The goal of this build was to get a solid start on our respective robots, as well as doing some team bonding and teaching new members the skills of FIRST. Everybody who attended worked together to make the event a fun and productive start to our season. Some of the activities that we had were spaghetti engineering, Onshape practice, and robot building.

Our team aims to enable as many people to succeed as possible. As part of this mission, we have participated in after-school tutoring sessions to help students who are struggling with certain subjects. We worked together with NHS and Key Club to fill all the tutoring slots. Our main focus during tutoring was math and science topics, but we also helped with language arts and history classes!

In addition, multiple team members also organize individual tutoring projects where they hold free online tutoring sessions within their community. These members teach mostly elementary and middle school students Math, Science, and Robotics