Reach Award

Our team’s outreach focuses on growing the FIRST community by raising awareness, recruiting new members, and making robotics visible in our local area.

Outreach Goals

We designed our outreach around four main goals:

• Spread awareness about FIRST and robotics opportunities
• Encourage community support through social media and donations
• Recruit new students, mentors, and volunteers
• Inspire others to join or start FIRST teams

At our Fall Festival:

• Our Pathfinder club sold Pizza to raise money and visitors learned about our team
• We Engaged directly with families and students interested in joining
• This allowed us to connect with people who had never been exposed to FIRST before.

Community Presentations

• We promoted FIRST through church outreach, reaching a broad local audience:
• We created and distributed custom bulletin inserts with our team and FIRST information
• We Delivered live announcements at multiple locations
• These efforts helped us reach our entire congregation expanding awareness beyond typical STEM audiences.

Digital Outreach

We created and shared videos promoting our team and FIRST, which:

• Achieved close to 5,000 views with increased engagement
• We demonstrated our starter bot, showing each part about it and how it maneuvered and worked
• We demonstrated gameplay on the field and explained how the tournament operates
• We Made robotics more accessible and exciting to a wider audience
• And it provided a useful tool for outreach and recruitment

Online Presence

Our team supports outreach through the WCCA Robotics website,(http://wccarobotics.github.io/) which:

• Serves as a central hub for information about our teams
• Helps interested students and families learn how to get involved
• Reinforces and extends the impact of our in-person outreach

Recruitment & Growth Impact

Our outreach has directly contributed to bringing new people into FIRST:

• Our team demonstrates recruitment impact with a first-time co-coach and a student who had never participated in anything like FIRST before
• We continued growing by recruiting an additional team member mid-season
• We supported FIRST LEGO League teams, including one made up entirely of new participants
• We are actively working to recruit new mentors, including local educators
• These efforts show our commitment not just to participation—but to expanding the FIRST community.