The Killer Bees strive to make sure everyone on our team knows what’s happening and when it’s happening. We have a Facebook group for all members of the team where they can post questions as well as discuss design and game play. We also make sure to keep an accurate and updated team calendar on the Team 33 website. This helps students, mentors, and parents plan their days according to the meeting and competition schedule. In order to keep in touch with sponsors, the Killer Bees publish a newsletter several times a year. This newsletter contains articles about competitions, upcoming events, outreach, FIRST, VEX, OCCRA, and just generally about being on the team. The newsletter is also put on the website for anyone else to read if they want to.
The STEM community doesn’t just exist by the Killer Bees home; it’s all across the world. Along with our private Facebook group, we have a public Facebook page for anyone to like in order to learn more about the team, who we are, and what we do. The Killer Bees also have an account on Twitter which we update often. While what we do best is live-tweet each competition, we also update in the offseason and on weekdays. If you ever want to know what the Killer Bees are doing on a given day, just check our Twitter. In addition, the Killer Bees have a YouTube account with all our team videos. Looking at our account, you can find past Chairman’s, reveal, and wrap-up videos, as well as the recently published Make It Loud video made for Dean Kamen’s homework.
The Killer Bees, like most other FIRST teams, have their own website. The website contains the newsletter and team calendar, as well as links to our Facebook and Twitter, but it also holds much more. On the site, you can learn all about the team history, sponsors, and mentors. In order to help new and old teams, we have our “White Papers” where we publish technical documents, code, CAD designs, Chairman’s award, Woodie Flowers award, and Dean’s list resources for other teams in order to get ideas and improve by using. We add our photos and videos to the site as well, under the “Media” tab. One of our newest additions is our “Buzz Blog” where we post what we do during the build season.
Getting word out there about our team isn’t all by us. The Killer Bees have been publicized many times. This past year, Chrysler published a video about their sponsorship of many FRC teams. While this video was about multiple teams, Team 33 was in it many times, and it ended with an iconic Killer Bee line, “I’m Ellen Green, and I’m awesome.” In addition, our team was featured in a PBS program about how technology changes the world. One of our biggest publicity moments was a news spread in MOPAR magazine. In it, Team 33 talked about engineering experience while covering the pages with our iconic yellow shirts in pictures.
Because of our presence in social media and publicity, the Killer Bees are known by people all over the world.