We presented to the employees of the company, Bind Benefits, and demonstrated our robot to the people there.

First, we gave them a presentation about youth robotics and the Freight Frenzy game. We explained how our robot works and detailed the programming specifically since we talked specifically with the engineers focusing on Bind’s website and app. We invited the engineers there to drive the robot and we answered their questions about youth robotics. We then received a tour of the company’s facilities and talked with some of the engineers at the demo. Since Bind is mostly focused on software we went more in-depth on the programming and computer vision portions of our robot when speaking with them. They were very nice and it was interesting to see the way that the company ran. Many of the employees work in Bulgaria so many of the attendees watched our presentation virtually.

At the White Bear High School construction site, the engineers of Kraus-Anderson taught us about how they organize the construction of a building. We learned that they often order custom parts. Many of the custom parts in this build are used for both structural and aesthetic reasons. They also taught us about their imaging systems which utilize a laser, camera, and drone to help layout the plans for buildings. The information from these devices can even be put into a CAD to help with planning. They showed us how they plan out everything about a building before starting to construct it which is a strategy we are going to use next season. We learned a lot from our tour and discovered many similarities between commercial construction and the FTC build season. For example, we both go through full designs before commencing with the physical construction process. Kraus-Anderson also CADs out their buildings in a similar way to how we use Fusion to CAD our robot. The tour was very interesting and we hope to be able to see the school again once they’ve finished it.

Our team spoke to the Kraus-Anderson engineers about our previous two seasons. We showed them a video of our robot and explained the FTC program. We told them about our various uses of CAD and custom parts. We also explained the FTC game to them and described how we work through the season to build the robot.

Five members of our team went to demo at a Stratasys’ company picnic to display our FLL robot and project. We were there with many FTC teams demoing their robots. We talked to almost a hundred Stratasys employees about FIRST and kids in STEM. Everyone was very interested in our research project, DripDrop, and liked to see the different design iterations of the case including the final design printed by Stratasys using polyjet technology.

It was cool to talk to some of the employees of our sponsor company and see what they thought of FIRST programs. Another neat part was getting to meet and interact with the FTC teams since we are a rookie FTC team now.