Outreach
Engaging our community with STEM!
The Bionic Bulldogs strive to be a positive member of our local, FTC, and global community. Each summer, we try to make a positive impact through a summer project. This year, we intended to help new members of our FTC community by working with FIRST Illinois to create a guide for new FTC teams to get up and running more quickly.
Last year, we created a tool library program at a number of our local libraries, hosting a tool drive in August to collect tools for the program.
Each year, the Bionic Bulldogs robotics team supports our local community's Color Run. This year, one of our members created a color cannon for the run to launch the color run's signature paint at the runners.
While COVID-19 disrupted most of our physical outreach plans, we sought out other ways to be useful, supporting the Folding@Home initiative to help researchers in the fight against COVID-19 and other diseases, creating a Bionic Bulldogs Folding@Home team, #256777.
To learn more about how Folding@Home helps fight COVID-19, click here
Two of our local libraries, the Brookfield Public Library and the Riverside Public Library, host annual community STEM events, and we participated in both this past year. Both events allowed us to bring STEM to a diverse audience united by a curiosity in science, technology, engineering, and math.
At the Riverside Library we brought STEM to the community by presenting our robot and presenting the popular Makey-Makey device to visitors of the library's event.
At the Brookfield Library's annual STEAM fest, we presented our robot and answered questions about our team and FIRST robotics. We also demonstrated and explained the science behind the color cannon one of our members made for the local color run. Additionally, the community learned about STEM topics through educational activities like the ones we presented at our tool drive.