On July 22, 2025, Terabridges went to Washington Jefferson College to spread the values and skills that are imperative in the FIRST community and give then an overview of our team.
What we did:
We presented about FIRST programs and gave them a season overview about our team and how it works, where we met with students who were mostly juniors and seniors in high school. Our outreach targeted audiences of the non-first community, and we got to introduce some of them to FIRST. The other minority of the audience had a first team, but they were either not strongly affiliated with FIRST; the others may not have had the initial resources to start a FIRST team either.
One takeaway from the general structure of the outreach was that the audience was more interested in our demonstrations of the robot and its functionalities rather than the presentation itself. In fact, there were numerous students who clearly demonstrated profound interest in our robot and our team. That indicated to our team that there is a lot of opportunity to spread robotics and create new teams if resources are provided. We actually expected that the presentation was going to make the most impact when it came to promoting the value and awesomeness of first.
Takeaways:
- Students of any age are more interested in our robot demonstration rather than presentation
- While we may not inspire everyone, many students were inspired after our presentation and asked many questions about our team and our robot.
What went well:
- The presentation was interactive due to the robot demonstration where the students came to the front and also the allowing of questions as interjections.
- The presentation, other than extraneous information, was good.
- With just four terabridges representative, that felt like a good number of students for an outreach like this.
What could be better:
- Now that we know the students are more interested in demonstration, we can allot more time to that than showing a video of us in action or spending too long on our CAD/programming.
Anything Else:
- This outreach was a more fun outreach.
- Dr Rama Bala is a teacher at that college, and that made it possible for us to reach out to them and present to them about FIRST! Thank you.
- We had a good group of presenters: Josh, Rohan, Prithu, and Sid.
