We were asked to come back to ‘Lunch with Robots’ by Magenic. We had previously attended their ‘Lunch with Robots’ as an FLL team, The Dots. We went to the Magenic Headquarters in St. Louis Park to do the demo. We packed our robot and brought our Engineering Notebook to show.

We were talking to Magenic workers for two hours and shared with 32 employees and two kids. We told them about how FTC worked and then show them our robot and how it worked. We also mentioned our 3D printing and showed them the Engineering Notebook. Many people we interested in the program, saying it was a great thing for kids in STEM. One person we talked to was very interested in FIRST as a whole. She loved what we were leaning and took a flyer about FLL Jr. for her nephew.

The demo went really well. We talked to people who supported FIRST or were just learning about it. It worked really well to talk to the employees during their lunch break and they seemed to enjoy it too. We would love to attend this event again.

We initially went to Conquest engineering to get some parts cut for our robot but ended up getting a tour as well. We walked around the big warehouse area of the Conquest Engineering building and saw many different machines, custom-made parts, and we got to be introduced to the many workers at Conquest. The whole tour took about an hour. This was a fun and educational experience and we hope to go back in the future.

One day during the building process of the lander we discovered we needed some metal pipes threaded. So, we went to a local engineering company called Conquest Engineering. There, they showed us how to tap the pipes and then we got to do it ourselves. They took us into the machine shop and we got to use their tapping machine. We tapped all eight of the pipes we need. They were really nice and we hope that they will be sponsors in the future.

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.