Community Activities

Our team has made a big effort to attend as many community events as we can. We also demo our robots at local schools and businesses. We have found that many people have never heard of these competitions, so it is very fun to talk about it. Look at the list below for all of the events we attended.

Feb 2010 The Bullbots did their Homework!!!

On February 16, 2010 we finally completed Dean Kamen's “Homework Challenge” from the 2008 season to “Tell your elected officials about FIRST”. The Bullbots told Senator Mike Crapo about the engineering classes available and how FIRST has opened educational opportunities for the Bullbot students.

Eric Joyner, What We Ought Not We Do 2006, Oil on wood panel Collection of Mark Holt

Feb 2010 Boise Art Museum

To compliment the exhibition “Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon,” BAM has collaborated with Micron Technology Foundation to present a series of robots built by young engineering students. On display from February 6- May 16, 2010.

Eric Joyner, What We Ought Not, We Do, 2006 Oil on wood panel, Collection of Mark Holt Courtesy of the San Jose Museum of Art

Jan 2010 Discover Engineering Day 2010

This was the biggest year yet! Not only did the Bullbots demonstrate our 2009 “Lunacy” Robot, but we were able to showcase all three FIRST programs. We shared the stage with three FIRST Tech Challenge teams from Rocky Mountain and Kuna High Schools and two FIRST Lego Teams from Meridian, Idaho including the 2010 Idaho State Champions “The Super Smarties”. We were told that the surveys all raved about the 'robot that shoots balls' across the gym. We look forward to attending next year!

Dec 2009 South Western Idaho FIRST Lego League Qualifying Tournament

The Bullbots assisted with judging and refereeing as well as with general volunteer activities. The Bullbots also helped set up the venue and then put it back the way it was before we invaded. The tournament hosted 47 teams from across Southern Idaho with nearly 1000 people in attendance to hear Barbara Morgan, Idaho's own astronaut speak.

Summer Camp 2009

We offered two sessions of Summer Camp this year. We also offered a session of "Parent/Pal" for younger campers and a "Pal" to help them. Between these three camps we introduced Lego Robotics to more than 60 children! Come to camp this summer! To find out more about Day Camp go to our "Camp Page".

July 2009 Relay for Life

Several of the Bullbots participated in the American Cancer Society “Relay for Life”. This is a 24 hour walk to raise money for Cancer research. Here some of us are sitting around the campfire while the others on our team walked.

Stamp Out Hunger... It's funny because it's the postal service

May 2009 National Association of Letter Carriers "Stamp Out Hunger" Food Drive

We helped sort food as it was brought in by the mail carriers. All of the food collected went to the Idaho Food Bank to feed the hungry in our community.

April 2009 Hewlett Packard "Take an Engineer to Work" Day

This is a fun event where the HP employees bring their children to work to show the children what cool things HP does. The Bullbots toured the Model Shop and were each given small model steam train engine printed with a large STL Machine (Rapid Prototyper).

Boise State University Engineering Day Image 2

Jan 2009 BSU Engineering Day Demo

The "Engineering Day" event gets bigger every year. This is our second year attending to demo the robot and promote FIRST robotics programs. We had a projector to show video of the past years FRC events and drove last year's robot around. We had many kids and adults interested in finding out more information on the programs offered by FIRST. We also had signups for our 2009 summer camps.

January 2009 Future Cities Competition

We spent the day at the future cities competition in Boise. It was a fun event to watch and we had many people interested in the FIRST activities.

December 2008 Southwestern Idaho FLL Qualifying Tournament

Since our team helped start up over 10 local FIRST Lego League teams, we also wanted to help put on the Southwestern Idaho FLL Qualifying Tournament held at Mountain View High School. It was a fun event to volunteer for and it really got us excited to compete in portland at our regional event. Many of our team members and mentors served as judges and referees. The rest of us were support staff helping competitors and their guests get to their events.

November 2008 Rake Up Boise

We participated in Rake Up Boise by raking up a gentleman's yard. He had several large trees and we raked up and collected more than 20 bags of leaves. Many of these bags we shredded as we bagged so each bag could hold more leaves.

September 2008 Micron Demo

Micron invited all of the teams in the surrounding area to the site to demo last year's game. It was a great way to show people at Micron what a great program this is and it was fun to get the robots out again. We were able to have the new members help with this event so they could see how much fun this is.

2008 Lego Summer Camps

We held two Lego robotics summer camps this past year. Go to our Summer Camp website to learn more. This was a great fundraiser for us and it helped generate a lot of interest in robotics. We are going to offer more summer camps this year.

April 2008 Science Day for Hispanic Students

We set up a table display as well as a Robot demonstration by Jason and Zach. There were more than 150 people in attendance. Most of these were high school students from predominantly rural schools from across Southern Idaho with large Hispanic populations to encourage these students to attend college.

April 2008 Robotics Demo at Hewlett Packard

During the month of April, the HP plant holds an event called "Bring your inventor to work". At this event, employees bring their sons and daughters to see many demos and enjoy many activities. This was our second year showing a demo of our robot and talking about the FIRST robotics program.

March 2008 Science Day at Boise State University

This demonstration was part of a Science Competition day sponsored by Boise State University. About One hundred Middle and High School students from around the state of Idaho came to BSU.

January 2008 Discover Engineering Days at BSU

This was our first year attending this event at BSU. We showed off the previous year's robot since the current one was being built. This is a great event that BSU puts on for the community.