How do the Killer Bees do Outreach?

The Killer Bees outreach plan has 2 major components – Service and Leadership. Our outreach includes both service and advocacy projects, some which are one-time events and others that are recurring every year. The Leadership component focuses on our own learning to improve ourselves to inspire others. The team does not have a minimum requirement of service projects or service hours. The students and mentors do these events, projects and campaigns because we are inspired to help others through the FIRST values of Gracious Professionalism and Coopertition.

Students on the Killer Bees are also deeply involved in service learning as part of their graduation requirements for Notre Dame Preparatory. Outside of the robotics team, the students average 100+ hours of service over their 4 years of high school. For us, service is part of what we do and is a part of what “Keeps the Hive Alive”.

How do we decide what to do? We use a simple set of questions to decide:
1. Can the activity be led by a student and mentor combination?
2. Does the activity align with the team goals to build leadership and inspire others?
3. Is the activity community-based, repeatable, demonstrates impact on participants and is it a responsible use of resources of time and money?
4. Does the activity build community and friendships within the team and between other FIRST teams?

The graphs below represent a summary of our activities from our bee-ginning in 1996 through 2018. FRC Team Assistance and FRC Team Sustainabilty are represented as the number of years we have worked with more than 10 teams in a year.  The data in the FRC Team Assistance category is a combination of the mentorship and assistance definitions as these defintions updated in the last 3 years and our support of these teams has included both engineering / robot and team support. FRC Team Sustainability is an aggregate of the number of years where we have provided advice or training to more than 10 teams where the teams contacted us directly for these activities.