A shout out to the two new Event Partners - Ms. Mack and Mr. Novak - from two different elementary/middle schools in the same neighborhood who decided 6 months ago they would hold a jointly run VRC for middle school.
They join two other teachers who held their first event in Dec- Mr. Zayner and Mr. Thomas - from two other schools in Baltimore who were brave enough to host a new VRC in the city this season.
As many Event Partners know, deciding to host an event for the first time in schools is a leap of faith. Without sponsorship you usually don’t make much in the way of fundraising by the time you are done with any insurance/custodian/rentals/volunteer food cost, and you need to recruit lots of volunteers - both experienced and new to robotics, need to deal with the school administrations, figure out transporting all the equipment, set up and tear down and the hundreds of details that need to be attended to. It is a lot of work the first time you do it.
Yesterday’s event had the full support of both principals who stayed through tear down and even went out with us for the “debrief.” Great volunteers, including 12 fantastic judges from the community-teachers, IT and mechanical engineers, corporate program managers, construction managers and someone who manages a national wine distributor. They spent a lot of time talking with the teams and had a blast and worked together to make some hard choices about which teams got the trophies.
We were honored to have one of Senator Barbara Mikulski’s assistants join us for the morning. Senator Mikulski is Chair of the Appropriations for Commerce, Justice, **Science **& Related Agencies for the US Senate and will be hearing about the work being done with robotics programs and competitions in schools, especially in Maryland.
This is a good thing.
Congratulations to all the teams, volunteers, and schools who made this a great event!