Start Your Own Father Daughter Engineering Day!
Overview:
Our goal with this event is to introduce girls (and their parents) to robotics as well as to Paradise Teams and FIRST® in
a fun, cost-free, low-pressure environment. We hope to provide a valuable family event that is engaging for both girls
and their fathers. By introducing this experience tailored specifically toward school-aged girls, our long term goal is to
increase female enrollment in our organization at all levels – as well as to engage fathers as adult mentors and coaches.
Schedule of Events:
Intro: ~10 minutes
Introduce That ONE Team, explain NXT, overview of materials and what the plan is going to be.
Build TaskBot: ~45 minutes
Student mentors will guide father-daughter teams and be available to answer questions as needed.
Programming (with student mentor assistance): ~2 hours
• Forward/back
• Turns
• Sensors:
• Sound
• Light
• Touch
• Ultrasonic (if time)
Closing: ~5 minutes
Show FLL video from GENIUS (Team GENIUS is an all girls FTC team that also did FLL in Atlanta Georgia); explain your NXT summer camp, pass out goodie bags.
What We Planned:
We met with the manager of the local library and arranged to hold the event at the library space in order to get
wide community exposure. We created brochures advertising the event and placed them at the library and at local
retail outlets in our area. We made an online signup form on our website as well as having a printed form available,
and created postcards to mail to the registered girls in the days preceding the event, reminding them to come. Our
organization, Paradise Teams, has previously run community ed classes focusing on NXT robotics which are based on the
Carnegie-Mellon Robotics Academy curriculum. We took what we already knew about running these classes, and our
coach and business team created a condensed class model that we hope will fit within a three-hour time frame. We planed
to debrief and adjust after the event in order to improve our plan so that we can hold these classes repeatedly in the
future.
For each father-daughter pair, we intend to have a That ONE Team student with NXT experience guiding the pair
through the process of building a TaskBot and learning about the process of programming and the capabilities of various
NXT sensors, while a coach gives general directions to all the pairs in the class.
Toward the end of the class, we will pass out small goodie bags to each of the girls (including a LEGO® minifig and some
candy, along with a business card for That ONE Team), and show a short video of a successful FLL robot run from an all-
girl team from Georgia with whom we have a longstanding relationship. We hope this will help get girls excited about
FIRST®! We will also explain opportunities to continue involvement with our organization through registering for our
week-long NXT summer camp or joining one of our FLL teams for the 2014 season.
We have included copies of our printed materials. We hope that this helps other teams model our idea and run
successful community events!
Our goal with this event is to introduce girls (and their parents) to robotics as well as to Paradise Teams and FIRST® in
a fun, cost-free, low-pressure environment. We hope to provide a valuable family event that is engaging for both girls
and their fathers. By introducing this experience tailored specifically toward school-aged girls, our long term goal is to
increase female enrollment in our organization at all levels – as well as to engage fathers as adult mentors and coaches.
Schedule of Events:
Intro: ~10 minutes
Introduce That ONE Team, explain NXT, overview of materials and what the plan is going to be.
Build TaskBot: ~45 minutes
Student mentors will guide father-daughter teams and be available to answer questions as needed.
Programming (with student mentor assistance): ~2 hours
• Forward/back
• Turns
• Sensors:
• Sound
• Light
• Touch
• Ultrasonic (if time)
Closing: ~5 minutes
Show FLL video from GENIUS (Team GENIUS is an all girls FTC team that also did FLL in Atlanta Georgia); explain your NXT summer camp, pass out goodie bags.
What We Planned:
We met with the manager of the local library and arranged to hold the event at the library space in order to get
wide community exposure. We created brochures advertising the event and placed them at the library and at local
retail outlets in our area. We made an online signup form on our website as well as having a printed form available,
and created postcards to mail to the registered girls in the days preceding the event, reminding them to come. Our
organization, Paradise Teams, has previously run community ed classes focusing on NXT robotics which are based on the
Carnegie-Mellon Robotics Academy curriculum. We took what we already knew about running these classes, and our
coach and business team created a condensed class model that we hope will fit within a three-hour time frame. We planed
to debrief and adjust after the event in order to improve our plan so that we can hold these classes repeatedly in the
future.
For each father-daughter pair, we intend to have a That ONE Team student with NXT experience guiding the pair
through the process of building a TaskBot and learning about the process of programming and the capabilities of various
NXT sensors, while a coach gives general directions to all the pairs in the class.
Toward the end of the class, we will pass out small goodie bags to each of the girls (including a LEGO® minifig and some
candy, along with a business card for That ONE Team), and show a short video of a successful FLL robot run from an all-
girl team from Georgia with whom we have a longstanding relationship. We hope this will help get girls excited about
FIRST®! We will also explain opportunities to continue involvement with our organization through registering for our
week-long NXT summer camp or joining one of our FLL teams for the 2014 season.
We have included copies of our printed materials. We hope that this helps other teams model our idea and run
successful community events!
| june_28_2014_father_daughter_engineering_brochure.pdf |
| 2014_father_daughter_registration_form.pdf |
| 2014_father_daughter_postcard.pdf |
