Tag open house

Manchester Machine Makers and the Cookie Clickers, sharing cookies in a robotics lab. FIRST Tech Challenge AGE - DECODE, in partnership with the Vermont Cooperative Extension.

FIRST AGE – DECODE Season Kickoff Party this Saturday!

P. Rutins Leave a comment
Manchester Machine Makers and the Cookie Clickers, sharing cookies in a robotics lab. FIRST Tech Challenge AGE - DECODE, in partnership with the Vermont Cooperative Extension.

The Cookie Clickers #18650 and the Manchester Machine Makers #16221 are hosting a party at the Manchester Community Library to celebrate the FIRST Tech Challenge AGE – DECODE kickoff on Saturday, September 6, 2025, 11am – 1:30pm.  We hope that you all will join us for this second annual Southern Vermont kickoff!

We will begin at 11am in the community room at the Manchester Community Library:

138 Cemetery Ave., PO Box 1105
Manchester Center, VT 05255
Phone: 802-362-2607

Map: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=138+Cemetery+Ave.%2C+PO+Box+1105+Manchester+Center%2C+VT+05255+Phone%3A+802-362-2607&iaxm=maps&source=maps

As teams arrive, we will form a panel of team representatives to discuss last year’s experiences and this year’s goals.

At noon, the challenge will be released by FIRST, and we will watch the livestream on the big screen to learn the rules of the new game. (If you can’t make it and want to sign up for a reminder to watch the livestream on your own, you can do that here).

Then, we open up the brand new field (thank you, FIRSTinVT!) so that everyone can experience the genius of the AGE: DECODE game, with whatever robots we have from last year, or from the summer’s experiments.  Feel free to bring your own robots as well!

There will be pizza for lunch, and each team will go home with a printed manual and a few game pieces.

We hope that you’ll all come and bring your expertise, ideas, and gracious professionalism to share!

Please let us know that you’re coming as a team so that we have enough manuals and game pieces on hand for you!

RSVP: ftc16221@gmail.com

Put it on your calendar:

What: FIRST Tech Challenge AGE: DECODE Season Kickoff

When: Saturday, Sept. 6, 2025 11am – 1:30pm

Where: Manchester Community Library (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=138+Cemetery+Ave.%2C+PO+Box+1105+Manchester+Center%2C+VT+05255+Phone%3A+802-362-2607&iaxm=maps&source=maps)

Thanksgiving Gratitude!

manchestermachinemakers Leave a comment

We hope you all had a very happy Thanksgiving, enjoying many good things. We certainly did! The Green Mountain Girls will be supporting us again this year; I encourage you to also support them as a great non-profit organization that helps fundraise for other local non-profit groups (including us, yay!)

The Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering has also provided us a grant to further outreach to the Greater Manchester community, with which we plan to design a robot “kit” to give hands-on experience during limited-time, casual workshops. After we finish building our competition robots, Cordelia and Cornelius and Thomas, we will use that experience along with the grant to put together some open house opportunities.

We have also been the beneficiary of several private donors – you know who you are, and thank you so very much!

All donations go 100% toward supporting our FIRST Tech Challenge program. All mentors and coaches are volunteers, and as we charge no membership fees, all of our funding comes from grants and donations.

This Giving Tuesday, please consider donating to the future of humankind. We are a club that teaches the next generation of innovators how to build robots and work with the technology of tomorrow, building robots out of repurposed Android devices. Help us shape the next generation of engineers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries – donate to your local robotics club, the Manchester Machine Makers, today with PayPal here.