What is the STEM Youth Community Service Day?
The STEM Youth Community Service Day is an outreach opportunity kicked off by Green Machine Reloaded as a result of our GoBabyGo Workshop (scroll down for details). Spurred by the success of the workshop STEMaction, Maryland's FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) affiliate partner, founded an annual community service event. FTC Teams will propose their service project ideas that leverage the talents of the Maryland FIRST Community. One team will be selected to run the next STEM Youth Community Service Day. The winners will have access to the USRA STEM Education Center for the day as well as up to $2,000 in matching funds to field their project.
Apply to host the next STEM Youth Community Service Day!
This opportunity is available to all FTC teams in Maryland and Washington DC. The application deadline for the STEM Youth Community Service Day is January 1, 2017. The winning team will be announced by February 1, 2017. The STEMaction Youth Community Service Day will take place in May 2017.
You can submit your proposal here: http://tinyurl.com/z22n3ed
Questions can be directed to [email protected].
You can submit your proposal here: http://tinyurl.com/z22n3ed
Questions can be directed to [email protected].
GoBabyGo Workshop
The Original STEM Youth Community Service Day
The STEM Youth Community Service Day was created as a result of our STEM Youth GoBabyGo Workshop. GoBabyGo is a project started by the University of Delaware to provide mobility to young disabled children (http://sites.udel.edu/gobabygo/). This is done by modifying motorized ride-on cars to turn them into disabled friendly rides. Currently, mobility assistance options for children under the age of five are very hard to come by. GoBabyGo solves that problem.
Green Machine Reloaded member Caleb Driesman took this idea and brought it to the STEM community in Maryland/DC with the STEM Youth GoBabyGo workshop. At this day-long event STEM enthusiastic youth learned about disabilities in their community from Easter Seals and constructed GoBabyGo cars. Here is an article from our local newspaper about it: http://tinyurl.com/gv5274q We had the opportunity to talk to US Congresswoman Donna Edwards about our GoBabyGo project during her tour of the USRA STEM Education Center. The Congresswoman described our work as "touching and powerful." See more here: http://tinyurl.com/jkcmvxj Due to the support of the entire team, the Maryland FIRST community, our partners STEMaction and Easter Seals, a Berlage Innovative Grant from the Maryland 4-H Foundation and our 27 generous donors, the project was a resounding success. Six were built at the workshop and two were built to promote and prepare for the workshop. The eight cars were given to Easter Seals to distributed to children in need of mobility assistance. But we didn't stop there. Our GoBabyGo fundraising and marketing campaign raised approximately $2500. This overwhelming amount of support has allowed us to continue the project. Currently there are three more cars under construction for a grand total of eleven GoBabyGo cars! Our partner STEMaction and two of our donors were so satisfied with the results that they put forward the idea of turning this into an annual opportunity for FTC teams to run their own workshops dedicated to community service. From there the idea became the STEM Youth Community Service Day! |
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