Sonoran Science Academy- Phoenix Visit

Sonoran Science Academy-Phoenix is Paragon’s sister school and part of the Sonoran schools district. They have been running a robotics team for five years and have competed in the state tournament several times. Their wonderful coach, Ms. Anna Newley, organized with Mr. Robert and Mr. Parker for us to visit them at their campus in Phoenix and share our experiences and ideas.

We arrived at SSA Phoenix at 10:30 in the morning and were graciously welcomed into their school. After breakfast and introductions, the SSA students opened a pre-made Jeopardy game and we had a lot of fun competing and interacting with members of the other team. Check out the pictures from the event!

At 12:30pm, we ended the game and went to lunch. Once we were done, we took a group picture and divided into our groups to discuss our departments and roles for this season. The notes from these discussions are added below.

Outreach: 

Today, we spoke to The Golden Eagles about how they could further improve their Outreach endeavors. They asked us various questions such as “What is the most important thing about Outreach?”, “How do you successfully fundraise?”, “How did you set up your team website?”, etc. and we answered them to the best of our ability based on our own Outreach experiences. It was a great experience for both teams as we looked back from what we did the previous season and spoke about how we can build upon them. Most importantly, we explained to them how crucial it is to promote the remarkable values of the FIRST program to the community and how to implement it in their events. Lina brainstormed more ideas for our judging session. Jinia also brainstormed a plan for the video we can possibly make to win the Connect Award.

Programming:

Colin and Hosam showed the Sonoran Science Academy-Phoenix team how to use Github to store back-ups of their program. We also explained telemetry to new students, and helped their builders to set up the game field.

Building: 

The builders of our team explained how our old robots were designed and run, and what problems we faced as a result. In addition, Abdullah and Omar showed some SSA students how to get REV robotics parts in any CAD program.

—

After our discussions, we cleaned up, thanked the Golden Eagles for hosting us, exchanged communication information, and headed back to Paragon. The 3D design department sketched a prototypes for the phone holder for this year’s Promobot, and the other students worked on filling out their minutes for the day’s events.