Outreach
Know STEM. No boundaries.
At AVBotz, we try our best to share our love for engineering and STEM with others. Here are some of the things we've been doing to give back to our schools and community.
ACE Code Day & Local STEAM Night
We held local events at three Pleasanton middle schools: Harvest Park, Hart and Pleasanton Middle Schools. To promote coding at younger ages we lead weekly after school lessons at Harvest Park and PMS. Many team members, especially from the software division, taught a 20 week course on Java and Python to 100 middle school students during the school year. Our members led workshops at a local hackathon, ACE Code Day, providing a plethora of workshops on robotics and computer science, ranging from a crash course in Open CV to an introduction to electrical engineering.
ACE Coding
Many of our members are part of Amador Valley's ACE Coding Club with many of them being introduced to coding when they were learners in middle school.
Pleasanton Ignite! 2.0
The Pleasanton Firehouse Arts center hosted Ignite! 2.0, a festival that celebrates music, art, science, and innovation. Several different groups entertained audiences, including EGO – UC Berkeley’s Traditional Korean Percussion Group, Hart Middle School’s Hartbeat Singers, Lucid DreamScapes, and Firelight Society. We participated among the 35 booths set up alongside the streets that represented the Museum on Main, Pleasanton Art League, Pleasanton Middle Schools, Foothill High School, Icicles, the City of Pleasanton Library, Creatures of Impulse, and Pleasanton High Schools CTE.
Inspiring Technology and CTE
We as a club often go out to present what is possible through determination and a motivation to try what’s new — from only what we know, we’re able to make a submarine that’s able to compete with other engineering universities. In other words, we try to increase the community’s awareness about the possibilities in robotics and engineering, through showcasing what we’ve accomplished.
Calvin Qin, AVBotz Member
Harvest Park Middle School Robotics Club
Many of our members become interested in STEM and robotics from a very early age due to the variety of opportunities provided in school early on. One of these opportunities comes through the middle school most of Amador's students attended. Over the past several years, AVBotz has sent members to meet with students during their club meetings on Thursdays during the school year to help them explore their LEGO Mindstorms kits. We hop from group to group to check on their progress and students can come to us anytime during the meeting if they need help with their robot.
LEGO Mindstorms EV3
The HPMS Robotics Club provides students from grades 6-8 with the opportunity to build with LEGO EV3 kits. Groups will build their own robot to navigate a course and complete tasks.
Passionate Learners
When we met with the local Lego Mindstorms robotics club at Harvest Park we arrived to find 50 middle school students ready to learn, fix problems, and ask questions to expand their knowledge about their robots.
Livermore Innovation Fair
The Livermore Innovation Fair is a family-friendly event is equal parts a science fair, high-tech exhibition, art show and community carnival.
The event focuses on local groups and how exciting developments in art, technology, and STEAM play an increasing role in fields as diverse as agriculture, entertainment, gaming, health, manufacturing, product design, robotics, space exploration, transportation, virtual reality, and music, among others.
While we aren't able to demonstrate our sub in-water at the fair, we participate to meet with other local organizations and show them our love for engineering by showing them the inner workings of our sub and telling them about RoboSub and what motivates us to compete.
Representing Amador Valley
AVBotz business members participate as one of the more than 50 interactive scientific displays, visual art and technology experiments spread across the plaza and inside the Bankhead Theater in Livermore.
