Local Community

Description of Program

Our team has rebranded our workshop curriculum that allows youth to adapt to a creative and innovative thinking mindset from an early age through hands-on STEAM activities.
We execute our program by partnering up with organizations such as:
• Port Credit Sea Scouts (Canada)
• Boys and Girls Clubs of Peel
• Yamana Gold (Official Sponsor)
• ISNA Elementary School
• Learning Disabilities Association of Peel Summer Camps
• Peel Multicultural Council Youth Immigration Group
We design each one of our workshops individually to adhere to the unique needs of each audience group, whether that be taking the time to simplify STEAM concepts based on their learning abilities or overcoming language barriers, thus creating equal educational opportunities for over 1,000 children in 3 cities since 2015

Various Program Levels

In order to adapt the various age groups and levels of expertise of our camp participants our team has organized our activities into four separate levels.
Each of the programs has a sample itinerary for the activities, however it can be easily adapted to accommodate different timelines and budgets. We have also published this resources on our website for other FRC teams to use.
By formally documentation our curriculum this year, it has allowed for our camps to become more standardized and easy to transfer knowledge to others. With a quick read of instructions any member of our team can take the initiative to host a workshop. Our team has devoted 120 hours to creating this program.

Our second series of local camps were conducted from November to December 2017 with the PCSS. We first began partnering with PCSS in 2015, by holding numerous one-day workshops and have impacted 200 students. Since then our relationship has grown to encompass a long-term strategy that brings robotics education to the sea scouts, symbolized by an honorary robotics badge that was added to their youth programs this year. We held 12 three-hour workshops Saturday at our school. Our curriculum instilled a passion for robotics within the participants, that two of the parents even bought their children Mindstorms Kits for Christmas, as that was the only gift they asked for. After PCSS youth expressed interest in starting FLL at their school, we set up a presentation at the April parent council meeting to advocate for funding.

Last summer, we connected with BGCP to organize 45 robotics workshops for 300 youth at 10 locations. The majority of the youth were from underprivileged families, who could not afford to pay the yearly $5 registration fee for BGCP. Due to our strong relationship with our school, we used 15 VEX Robotics kits from our computer engineering classes to run our camps free of charge. This initiative entailed the collaboration of 20 team volunteers, who spent 543 hours in planning, hosting, & traveling to each workshop. Due to the positive reception of these camps, we are confirmed to host another series of robotics workshops this summer. As BGCP have seen first hand, the growth of all participants, now passionate about robotics, they would like to officially start an FLL team at each of their locations as a long-term goal with our continued partnership.

Due to our strong partnership with one of sponsors Yamana Gold, we were invited to host a fully funded 6 hour robotics workshop for 33 children of the employees at their corporate office last year. Our team planned various activities such as building and testing lego capaults, a driving obstacle course and robotics themed arts activities.
We planned to take these robotics workshops to an international level through the Yamana Gold offices in Brazil and Chile. The company had confirmed these workshops for summer 2017 and we had already started planning them in collaboration with FRC Team 1382 from Brazil and FRC Team 2576 from Chile. However, due to major changes in employee positions and budget cuts the company has moved the workshops to this upcoming summer.

Our team held a full day robotics workshop for over 250 elementary school students at ISNA School to introduce them to the FIRST program and participate in inquiry based STEAM learning. We held activities such as a Marble Board Game, Tower and Bridge Construction and learned about our 2016 robot. The school even provided our volunteers certificates in appreciation of our tremendous efforts to host this workshop

Our team hosted a series of workshops with the Learning Disabilities Association of Peel using Lego robotics for 150 participants. We dedicated over 50 hours of service and planned our workshop curriculum to adhere to their individual needs. The workshops were so successful that we even received very positive feedback from the organizers. Our rookie FRC Team shadows us at this event.

Our team held robotics workshops for the Peel Multicultural Council for over 70 youth immigrants. We engaged with Lego robotics construction challenges, obstacle-driving courses and basic programming concepts. Through this initiative we were able to introduce new immigrants to FIRST Robotics and integrate them within the Canadian culture. We also overcame language barriers at this event by using our diversified team members.

We have partnered with this NPO to teach all RTP program staff our robotics curriculum so they can deliver FIRST programs to 300 schools in Ontario by the end of 2018. The schools that are local to our team have also requested specific coding & build workshops at their schools which we will begin to deliver at the end of this competition season.
The federal government has allocated a portion of this budget to RTP, part of which the organization is planning to use on fund ing our robotics curriculums in schools, ensuring the future success of our program. Our future goals with the help of RTP are to bring our programs to their network of students in countries they already operate in such as Ethiopia, Jordan, & Rwanda as well as reach their network of indigenous communities.
We held a meeting at the Right to Play Office on April 9th, 2018 to start planning this future project. After introducing our robotics curriculum to their staff we collaborating to introduce FIRST at their educators conference this summer.