The CocoNuts Robotics "News Feed"

Last Friday, after a week of preparation, the CocoNuts packed up their demonstartion gear, and their robots, Astra and RoboPup, and took them downtown for the Flagstaff Festival of Science . The next day on Saturday, the CocoNuts excited the youth of Northern Arizona about STEM (Science, Technology, engineering, Mathematics) at “Science in the Park” at Wheeler Park in downtown Flagstaff, with FLL and FTC demonstrations. Elementary and middle school students crowded around our FLL field, wanting to learn more. One child even asked if he could start programming one of the bots! A bit later in the day, the CocoNuts impressed a (supposedly) more mature audience at the Northern Arizona University Mountain Campus Science and Engineering Day at the High Country Conference Center. The CocoNuts and several fellow FRC teams rocketed their robots across the conference room carpet with their “more mature” audience having fun playing orbit-ball catch with the robots. At the end of the day, all the members of the CocoNuts had fun while inspiring others.

At the Festival of Science, our team realized just how successful our iniatives and public outreach activities are. Parents walked up to us wanting to learn how to start an FLL team, organizations and businesses came up to us asking how they could help, random people came up and told us that they could volunteer for whatever we needed. It’s great to live in such a caring and supportive community as Flagstaff!