2023-2024 Season
For our third year, team Cryptic wanted to continue reaching out to as many young students as possible with STEM opportunities. Throughout the summer, our members were busy hosting summer classes that taught inquiring students the fundamentals of FTC: programming, building, and marketing. To teach these skills, Cryptic members created their own curriculum, guiding participants to learn as much as possible in one summer. Our members helped students construct their own robot, which was showcased at the annual Howard County STEAM Festival, where County Executive Calvin Ball recognized their skills.
National Advocacy Conference 2023
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Due to the success of last year's National Advocacy Conference, our team members attended the 2023 National Advocacy Conference in Washington D.C. Members from Cryptic once again met with the senators that represent Maryland in Congress: Senator Ben Cardin and Senator Van Hollen. Additionally, they also met with Representative John Sarbanes. The same legislation that funds STEM program was discussed, and once again the Senators reaffirmed their support in funding title IV, part A of the Every Student Succeeds Act. The additional funding in the Every Student Succeeds Act will allow the government to allocate more funding into STEM programs, including FIRST. Due to the experience that our team members gained from the previous year, team Cryptic lead the meetings with Senator Van Hollen. The experience helped Cryptic network with several teams from around the Country.
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Boy Scouts Troop 361
Team Cryptic held an outreach event with Troop 361 of the Boy Scouts of America in the local community. During this outreach Cryptic first introduced the concept of FTC along with the FIRST organization as a whole to over 50 scouts. We then introduced our team and our role in FTC, explaining the engineering process and how it applied to our robot. Finally, we demonstrated an early version of our robot to the kids and answered any questions that they had about any of the three sections of our presentation.
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HoCo Hazards #22742
In order to provide students as many STEM opportunities as possible, Cryptic continued to mentor and host in partnership with the Howard County Library System FTC team HoCo Hazards #22742 to give our community the opportunity to prepare for and compete in FTC. Through communication with the library system President and teen curriculum direction, we were able to continue the completely free public FTC team for our county. The Library System provided funds, and our members dedicated their extra time to mentoring and leading the team. Over 60 new and returning students signed up immediately, however, we could only accept around 20 members to the team.
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Miller and Central Branch Outreaches
In partnership with the Howard County Library System, Cryptic debuted the "Taking Your First Steps in STEM" event for the third year at the Miller and Central Branch Library to reach new audiences in different parts of the county. Some of the activities we coordinated:
- Create Race Cars: Participants are given different Lego pieces to create cars that will race to travel down a ramp as far as possible that will simulate the trial and error process when building.
- Learn to Code: Participants will get an accurate feeling of how programmers try to solve difficult problems in different ways using block code.
- Build a Rube Goldberg Machine: Students created a Rube Goldberg Machine that transports a ping pong ball from the start point to the end point, teaching the design process taught by the design team.
- Bridge Building: Students utilized Legos to construct bridges that had to sustain a specified weight. Participants learned the process of trial and error, and learned how to prototype designs.
Team S.T.A.T.I.C #18996 and Team Epsilon #20124
In order to network with more teams, Cryptic mentored Team Epsilon #20124, a sister team, guiding them to create their own robot. In addition, Cryptic met with Team S.T.A.T.I.C #18896 from Clarksville, MD, to brainstorm ideas at the beginning of the season. Throughout the Centerstage season, Cryptic guided S.T.A.T.I.C and even helped CNC parts for their team.
