Charged Up - 2023
Written By: Chairman's Team
We are Huskie Robotics Team 3061! With a current 125+ members, we are evergrowing, cultivating a passion for STEAM, inclusivity, and community impact. We aim to give everyone on our team an equitable and rewarding FIRST experience, fostering our close Huskie family in the process.
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Inclusion
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Inclusion is a core value of our pack. Our preseason is dedicated to helping members find their ultimate place within our family whether STEAM related or not. Members are also able to work between subteams, amplifying the exploration of passions
Within Our Team
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Our strong network of mentors lead leadership workshops, ensuring all leads and aspiring leads understand skills such as crucial conversations. This mitigates conflict and creates a culture of empathy and efficient problem solving within our pack. For me, personally, the strong culture of empathy this team establishes has allowed me to better see multiple perspectives from a leader standpoint.
We promote and prioritize mental health, making our large family feel more connected. Our Big Sibling, Little Sibling program allows for every new member on our team to have one of dozens of veteran members to turn to for support and guidance, robotics related or not. This sense of mentorship better helps welcome members onto our team.
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Inclusivity
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We incorporate inclusivity into all aspects of our team and outreach. With over half our team leads being female, we make sure all voices are heard. By participating in the NCWIT Red Chair Movement, we have reached new horizons. We sit down to stand up. When bringing the red chair to outreach events and competitions, we empower girls across FIRST, sharing their stories of diversity and breaking barriers.
Joining the HuskyADAPT movement has allowed us to make an impactful change, modifying robotic toys with an adaptive switch. Now, with just the push of a large button, individuals with disabilities are able to easily interact with toys. Our continued partnership with Treehouse Therapy has allowed us to distribute these toys, leaving the gratifying image of smiling faces imprinted in our hearts. We are looking to expand our efforts into our schools to cultivate an equitable experience having fun and developing motor skills.
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FLL
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We take pride in our well established and ever growing FIRST pipeline. We recognize the integral role we play in introducing hundreds of young pups to the world of STEAM through FIRST. Young pups look up to 3061 members as more than solely a mentor; they see an older sibling they can count on. We host annual district tournaments for our elementary FLL pups to showcase their enthusiasm and efforts prior to the age when they may join an official team. Hearing a gym filled with hundreds of passionate young pups fuels us to amplify our initiatives. We later run an official FLL qualifier for our middle school and other teams, one of the largest in Illinois. Our pipeline is ever growing, powered by our district’s investment in our team’s support, and we plan to continue growing our FIRST impact.
Outreach
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Our annual D203 Summer Camp encourages youth to explore FLL and sparks their path of discovery through FIRST. Members commit their time guiding young participants through comprehensive presentations, teaching them various facets of FLL such as Innovation project, SPIKE, Core values and more.
We invited our community to hear an evening of stories from women in STEM, an event where accomplished individuals shared the challenges faced in their fields and participated in an interactive Q&A. Focused on empowering young girls to find their passion, we created a space for experiences to be shared, questions to be asked, and dreams to be grown.
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.Future Plans
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We continue to push our boundaries, spreading the message of FIRST. Furthering the development of SPOT, our open source modular scouting app, we’ve improved analysis modes, added match-scouting probability, and updated the app to fit the current game. By promoting it on social media, we improve our relationships with fellow FRC teams, allowing them to implement our powerful software into their team’s strategy methods with ease.
Our team is also creating a children’s book entirely from scratch, detailing a young girl’s story as she is introduced to STEAM. We hope to inspire youth who are not involved in STEAM to recognize its importance. We strongly value inclusivity, and as such advance our efforts through expanding our outreach audience, promoting gender equality, and increasing accessibility of STEAM to all.
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We are Huskie Robotics!
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Once a Huskie, a Huskie forever. We are always adapting, celebrating our journey as a united pack. We truly are more than robots. We are coopertition, gracious professionalism, innovators and believers. We stand for diversity, inclusion, and sustainability. We are an unstoppable growing family. We shape the future; we are the future. We are Huskie Robotics Team 3061.
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