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This week we used meeting time for publicity and recruitment. On Tuesday 9/22 we attended the Jemison Magnet Assembly for the College Academy in the lunchroom. Incoming students and parents had the opportunity to learn about the robotics program at Jemison, talk to team members, and see our 2025 robot.
Thursday 9/24 was the Homecoming Parade and Carnival. We weren't able to be in the parade, but we did participate in the Carnival. It was held on the track behind Jemison. We brought our 2025 robot, Cheddar Cheese, to the event. Team members were able to visit food trucks and other activities going on. Several people stopped by to learn about our robotics program and pick up a brochure and button.
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There was one other FRC team there - 538 Renaissance Robotics, and two FTC teams. Each team went in front of the attendees and talked about what they do. We look forward to attending next year's symposium!  We participated in STEM day again this year. We had our robot on the upper level of the gym so we wouldn't damage the wood gym floor. Many students came by to learn about our robotics program. Our annual visit to the Rotary Club of Greater Huntsville also happened on the same day. So after showing off our robot in the morning we loaded up and headed to the RFCU Annex on Wynn Drive. The mentors and students had an awesome lunch, gave an overview of the robotics program, and then demonstrated the robot for the Rotary members. Thank you Rotary Club for supporting our team! At the end of the 2024-25 school year we were told we had to move out of our 2nd floor College Academy physics lab, but not to panic, because we were going to be moving into the vacated Greenpower shops downstairs in the Advanced Manufacturing wing. This meant packing LOTS of boxes and moving everything downstairs. We packed up the physics lab over the end of the school year and into the summer, working around floor waxing and other obstacles.
 It was amazing how much was in this store room in the physics lab. Pretty much every spot of horizontal surface in the lab and storeroom, plus all the drawers and cabinets had items in them.  This is our new space. We are located on the Advanced Manufacturing hall, right where Main Street splits going towards the auditorium and the gym. We are at the beginning of the hall leading to the gym. Our two rooms are the 3D Printing Room and the Composites room.
With the help of Rotary Club of Greater Huntsville members and a few parents we started moving everything downstairs on July 22. We had to wait for the Greenpower/Adv. Manufacturing teachers to move all their items out of the shop space before we could move our items in.
When we actually moved everything in downstairs we discovered that the "empty" rooms had more items put in them between the end of the school year and when we actually moved. You can see the rooms in the video below. We just moved our stuff into the empty spaces, but couldn't unpack yet. We had to wait for the construction crews to finish the Redstone Federal Credit Union, which was another Greenpower room to the left of ours.
We started unpacking everything in the beginning of August. Normally we start team meetings the second week of school, but were unable to do so until September this year. We have almost everything organized now, but it's still a work in progress. We keep figuring out new layouts for computers, toolboxes, workbenches, etc. All of the Greenpower items were removed, with the exception of the CNC machine, by the end of the 2025-26 school year.  We also have a storeroom in our new rooms. It's smaller than the one we had in the physics lab, but we will make do. We have almost finished unpacking, storing, and labeling everything. Still a work in progress, though. We weren't able to attend our annual visit to the Rotary Club of Greater Huntsville, so we scheduled it for September. We attended with our robot and everyone had a fantastic lunch. The students presented and demonstrated our robot to the Rotary members.    The Jemison Science Department put together a school STEM Day this year, and we think it will become an annual event! They hosted it on the floor of the competition gym, with teachers and invited presenters having booths around the gym. The Space & Rocket Center, National Society of Black Engineers, and others had tables. Several teachers displayed their class content, such as health care, industrial manufacturing, chemistry, and other classes. Each grade at the school was able to spend about an hour going around to the tables to try their skill at rocket launching, stitching a wound, making lava lamps, etc. Of course the CyberJagzz were there! However, swerve drive and basketball courts don't play well, so we set up on the upper concourse in front of the concessions stand.  We had students and faculty lining up to drive our 2025 Reefscape robot around. We turned the speed of the drive way down for safety, and disabled one of the mechanism. However that didn't stop students AND faculty from having fun making the robot spin around drive in the area. The team members enjoyed teaching their teachers something new!   Even Dr. Leverette, the school principal, had a turn to drive!  Everyone had a great time. Present and former team members stopped by to help run our table. We even had a few students fill out applications to join the team for next school year.
We look forward to next year's STEM Day!  Our team was asked to help out on STEM Day at Montview Elementary. We got there around 9 AM and helped until 1:30 PM or so. There were several individual classes of 3rd - 5th grade students that visited the STEM Lab in shifts. Our team members assisted the children with programming a simple robot. Our students had a great time and look forward to doing something similar in the future.    We were once again privileged to host an international group of women in science & technology at Jemison. This year eight ladies from Colombia, Costa Rica, Greece, Guatemala, Jordan, Morocco, Republic of Korea, and Pakistan participated in the State Department program.  The group first came up to the robotics lab (second floor in the College Academy) and spoke with the students about the team and the robotics program. The visitors each told their story about what they do while the students listened with interest.   We then took the group to see the Advanced manufacturing where they saw the 3D printers they have down there and learned about the Greenpower car, Mechatronics, and Welding programs. We finished the visit with a group photo under the Mae Jemison portrait in the main hallway. The students were so engaged in the visitors that several exchanged email addresses before the day was out.   We attended the Huntsville Science Festival, better known as STEAMfest, for the fourth time. Originally the festival was at the VBC and had around 40 vendors. Now it's too big for the VBC with almost 100 vendors. It was held at the Orion Amphitheater this year! There were several robotics teams in attendance. Some had their own booths. FIRST Robotics had a large booth in front of the amphitheater stage. We participated in the FIRST booth.  Almost all the booths were hands-on for the attendees. We let children drive one of our robots while supervising them carefully for safety. Our prototype swerve chassis had the speed turned down so if it did get away from us it would not be likely to hurt anyone. All the students had the chance to go around to all the exhibits when they weren't helping out at our booth. The Cave Sim activity was a favorite of our students. There were many, many more interactive STEM booths for everyone to enjoy. The students were tired after our 10AM-4 PM day, but everyone had a great time! We participated in the school Trunk or Treat event for the first time this year. The activity started out a few years ago, when it was held outside. Then it started raining, so they moved it inside to the competition gym. However, it has now grown so much that they will hold it outside next year. Since we had never participated we didn't know exactly what to expect. We purchased a bag of candy to hand out, and then decorated last year's robot in some creepy spiderweb ribbon. We got our little wagon full of materials - the candy, brochures, buttons to hand out, the paper mache jag head for the candy, etc. at Tuesday's meeting. Then we met after school on Wednesday to bring everything down to the gym. Our lab is on the 2nd floor, so everything had to go to the elevator on the opposite end of the school from the gym. Then once in the gym down another elevator to the floor level of the gym. Only that elevator was broken. Not wanting the students to carry almost 100 pounds of robot down stairs we opted to only bring our small swerve chassis down. We set up our table and prepared to be scared by all the little goblins. Click on the captions to see the photo. Once the event started we realized we were woefully underprepared with the quantity of candy we had. And the decoration of our booth. Stay tuned for next year's booth! Ideas are already being generated. |
