FRC 568 believes that STEM drives society’s forward progress and will lead the world into a brighter future. Exposing youth to STEM topics allows for the potential for pursuit in these fields. This belief is why the team conducts youth outreach.
Summer Camps: The Nerds of the North volunteer at summer camps at the UAA Summer Engineering Academies and at the Anchorage Museum, where the team teaches students how robots work, and how to program and drive a robot. FRC 568 presents students with challenges and encourages them to work together to find creative solutions and practice coopertition and gracious professionalism.
STEM Days: The team volunteers at dozens of local STEM Days events, where they provide hands-on activities that teach children STEM concepts beyond robotics, including binary beaded bracelets, paper airplane launching, and kazoo making.
Women in STEM: The team conducts outreach at STEM events specifically aimed at girls such as Smart Girls Rock! and Introduce a Girl to Engineering. FRC 568 provides tours of engineering labs, robot demonstrations, and interactive activities explaining the engineering process. Over the past 2 years, the team has reached approximately 200 middle and high school girls at these events.
Workshops: Nerds of the North assist and hold workshops to help people and teams build robots and learn programming. They have participated in BP Bring Your Kid to Work Day, where they taught younger kids how to build and program basic FLL and FTC robots for the day. The team also assisted with an event hosted by the JABOTs(Just A Bunch Of Techies) FTC team, which helped FLL teams prepare for their qualifiers.