Today we’d like to introduce you to FRC Team 5338 RoboLoCo. Them and their team share their story with us below:
Our story starts way back in 2013 when our team was founded. Starting out with around 10 members, our team has rapidly grown 120 members this past season. Starting out as a purely technical-focused team, RoboLoCo focused heavily on designing, manufacturing, and coding in our team’s early years. However, in the past few seasons, RoboLoCo has focused heavily on outreach and graphic design in order to market our team and expand our message to a larger audience. This past season, our team had started a STEM Advocacy podcast called Robocast. This podcast features various FIRST teams nationwide, analyzing the differences between teams while sharing similarities and giving listeners ideas of how to spread STEM in their communities. On top of that, Robocast featured Kate Haberlin, an AWS programmer, in order to empower the women audience to pursue a STEM career even if they may feel like a minority.
Secondly, RoboLoCo started a nontechnical resource bank, called FIRST Steps. This website was designed for rookie teams to use our team’s templates for Sponsorship packets, outreach timelines, and more! Numerous teams, such as Team 8726 The CryptoHawks, were able to use our templates and start non-technical initiatives in their respective communities. Recently, we made this Resource Bank collaborative, so other experienced teams can add their templates to make FIRST Steps a forum for rookie teams to use. In the future, RoboLoCo is planning to partner with BRICKS4KIDZ in order to start up FLL teams in impoverished communities and provide them with the tools and guidance necessary to get started. Through these initiatives, our team was able to win the Engineering Inspiration Award at our District Qualifiers and District Championships, allowing us to compete at the World Championships in Houston!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
One obstacle that we faced was the quick turnaround time between our Chesapeake District Championships and the FIRST World Championships. Having found out that we qualified to go to Worlds just nine days before traveling to Houston, we were extremely excited for this amazing opportunity but also underprepared to gather the funds and resources needed for a trip of this size. At our District Championships, the competition organizers needed us to pack our robot in a crate to ship to Houston as soon as possible, but since we had never traveled so far, we never made a crate for our robot. Luckily, Team 422, the Mech Tech Dragons, graciously allowed us to borrow and modify their crate so that we could complete our shipping and registration for Worlds at the competition. Immediately upon coming home, with the help of our community and mentors, we channeled our excitement into fundraising efforts that could allow us to take as many of our members as possible. We started a GoFundMe that raised a grand total of $20,120 within two weeks! We also worked with local Chesapeake teams, our local Roy Rogers franchise, and Loudoun Now to share a POD to transport all of our materials, host a car wash fundraiser, and share our story with all of Loudoun County. Through these efforts, we were able to take 43 members on this journey!
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
RoboLoco places a high level of focus on the technical and non-technical aspects of FRC. To ensure that everyone who has a desire to pursue STEM, regardless of their interests, can find their passion in STEM, we offer a series of technical and non-technical workshops in the preseason for our new members. Through these workshops, we allow our new members to explore two very different, yet critical, aspects of FRC and hope that they can find an unknown talent or passion that they can continue into the build season! This season, we also hosted many recruitment events, such as after-school Open Houses, showcasing at the Academies of Loudoun Orientation and Club Fair, and hosting interest meetings during lunch. To make sure that anyone in Loudoun County who is interested in joining the team is able to join the team, we reach out to all the high schools in our county via social media and email, and we have no team dues or prior experience requirements. These efforts allowed us to recruit over 120 new members coming straight out of COVID.
Over COVID, we also learned that we could not take our ability to connect with our community in-person for granted and that we had to find new ways to expand our impact virtually and beyond our immediate community. To do this, we started Robocast, a STEM podcast designed to advocate for STEM education, representation, and opportunities. We also started FIRST Steps, which is a non-technical resource bank targeted toward rookie FRC teams, since we realized that business, creativity, and safety are critical aspects of FRC, yet there aren’t many central resources for rookie teams to utilize, and we wanted to create an equitable environment that reduced the stress for new teams to establish themselves. Even though we started these new initiatives, we also continued our tradition of in-person community outreach, such as showcasing at local STEAM nights and hosting FLL Explore Festivals. Next season, we hope to expand on our outreach initiatives by partnering with Bricks4Kidz to start FLL teams for underrepresented groups in STEM and host collaborative workshops to introduce them to STEM and provide them with the guidance needed to succeed.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
A small lemon helped our team go a long way this season! Gerald the Safety Lemon is the non-technical mascot of RoboLoCo. The “origin story” of Gerald dates back to 2019 when a couple of team members found a small foam lemon lying on the sidewalk at an outreach event. The team decided to draw a smiley face on him, put on some glasses, and thus, Gerald the Safety Lemon was born. Since then, Gerald has come to embody RoboLoCo’s mission of creating something that’s more than a robotics team. Just like how Gerald represents the non-technical aspects of FRC- business, outreach, creative design, safety-, RoboLoCo has team members who are active in these areas as well. Thanks to them, we’ve been able to organize a variety of different outreach initiatives, from hosting a podcast to going on Capitol Hill for lobbying to supporting underrepresented students in STEM. Above all, however, Gerald represents a way that our team is able to both stand out, while also fostering connections with other teams. We even got to take Gerald along with us to the World Championships in Houston! There, we had a poster where people could draw their own versions of Gerald; teams from all across the US and the world participated and shared their own custom Gerald designs with us.
Contact Info:
- Website: team5338.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roboloco_5338/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/team5338?lang=en
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3c15A40t41m1l4kO3GrHEg
