Aiding the community and the development of our younger generations of scientific and engineering minds, we, the members of Team 2489, have always jumped at the opportunity to donate our time and effort to help run events other than our own. For example, members of Team 2489 recently volunteered at the 2008 FIRST Lego League Competition.

FIRST Lego League (FLL) is a competition that allows children to experience the fun and challenging world of tech and robotics at an early stage with separate leagues for age groups from as young as 6-9 to 9-14. It is the introduction for many kids to learning the basics of engineering, design, and programming, skills that may become invaluable to them later in their education and beyond. In addition to this, FLL features practical challenges involving real-world examples of science working to improve society scaled down to a simple, more understandable level. Many of our own members owe this wonderful program for piquing our interests and motivating us to continue to learn and compete in other robotics tournaments today.

For the 2008 challenge Team 2489 members volunteered as student mentors to local teams from Hopkins Jr. High School. Helping these younger contestants by stimulating creative ideas, building team bonds, and understanding the science involved in robotics, we lead them on a steady course to discovering their own potentials as engineers. In addition to aiding the teams of younger students, members of Team 2489 also found the necessity in helping the parents of our contestants understand what their children were accomplishing and informing them about the nature of the competition and even future programs that may help augment the child’s developing skills. Throughout the duration of the build season, our members were at the sides of the children, reaching out with a helping hand whenever they required our assistance and redirecting them whenever they lost focus or seemed to veer off course.

After a long period of hard work for the teams, parents, and our own volunteers, the day of the tournament finally arrived on Sunday, December 14. By this time we were proud to see the effort we made to mentor these teams pay off in their final robots. However, our work wasn’t finished just yet. The team had also decided to volunteer for the competition on that day as well. Hopkins Jr. High was hosting a multitude of FLL teams from all over the district, and with such a huge number of kids, chaperones, and robots there would be a chaotic mess without proper management. Luckily, with the combined efforts of the volunteer students and parents, we were able to organize stations and even provide practice space with timetables that allowed an equal opportunity for all teams to prepare for the tournament.

Of course, in addition to setting up for the competing teams, members of Team 2489 could also be found elsewhere in the tournament helping in various ways from fixing sound to announcing and commentating for the tournament as an emcee. As a matter of fact, since the DJ had failed to show up that day, we decided to take jobs as impromptu sound technicians and DJ's by providing personal music from our mp3’s or iPods and operating the projection of live video coming from cameras that were capturing the tournament action on either table. While some of us were entertaining the crowd with music and video, our emcee volunteer did a wondrous job of providing exciting commentary.

Although we worked quite hard to give back to our community, we also enjoyed ourselves with our work. We look forward to seeing these younger contestants in FLL join our ranks in the high school robotics teams in the future where they will hopefully make use of the experiences they have received in order to find their niche and become an asset to our ever-growing team as well.