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Thanksgiving Gratitude!

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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. 

Congratulations to our Graduates!

P. Rutins 1 Comment
Charlotte
Jacob
Amos

It’s been a great year, and we’ve been truly lucky to have such a great team. So it’s with an equal measure of dismay and pride that we send off our three Seniors into their next adventures: Charlotte, founding member, hardware specialist, public relations lead, and project manager (and by night, more of the same!); Jacob, engineer and driver extraordinaire, and Amos, all-around assembly designer/builder/musician/etc. We wish you all great success and we will miss you!

While we will have a hard time filling all those shoes, we will have our returning members with yet another season’s worth of experience under their belts. And of course, we’ll have plenty of room for more budding roboticists! David and Patty are returning as coaches with at least some of Meg’s help (what would we do without Meg?); and we are partnering with EPS, and with BBA, to make robotics engineering more available to the youth in our community.

This summer’s project is to construct both a stationary programming board and a mobile programming board as a development platform for our navigational systems, funded by a grant from the Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering this past winter. We don’t know what the next game will be, but it’s a fair guess that we’ll have to navigate! We will use a goBilda strafer chassis as a base, with the REV Robotics Control Hub, a camera, and four distance sensors. Stay tuned for updates.

We’re looking forward to the start of next season’s game, “Power Play”, and we hope you’ll join us!

(Also, we have the contact info for Charlotte, Jacob, and Amos in our back pockets. Just sayin’.)

a photobombing rubber ducky