Alicia's Attic

This afternoon Anita and I loaded up the car with Qtools Sewing Edge product and packaging material and headed to Poudre High School here in Fort Collins. The Alpine Robotics team agreed to package our purple strips as a fund raiser for their FIRST Robotics Team Competition. Both of my sons  have been involved with this group and I am amazed at the opportunities this program offers young people interested in something other than athletics. Through FIRST Robotics, the students experience working as a team to build a robot in 6 weeks and then have the robot compete against and with other teams in their region and finally in Atlanta where the world championship is held.

Professional engineers mentor the teams during the build season to help them with the design and manufacturing of the robot. This provides an opportunity for the engineers to learn more about themselves and to inspire young people to pursue the technical fields.The students learn electronics, mechanics, software engineering, animation, marketing, fundraising, and more. One of the ideas they teach is to compete with gracious professionalism. Everyone is there to help each other, and enjoy some fun competition. After six weeks, some teams don't have their robot working completely, other teams have the robot but the mechanics are not very effective, while other teams dominate the competition. You'll find teams helping those in need even when they are competing later in the day.

You may be wondering how a group of high school students can make a robot in that short amount of time. It is definitely a challenge and they pour their hearts and souls into those six weeks. When it all comes together and the competitions happen, I am reminded that this isn't about the robot. The robot provides an opportunity for these young people, our future engineers, to find themselves and know that they can make a difference with their ideas. They learn how to work together with gracious professionalism.

Watching the 20 plus team members learn about assembly line production through the packaging of sewing edge, was cool. They stayed to task, learned modifications that would help the process, kept their eyes open for quality issues, and when the two hours were over, I heard them talking about how fun the afternoon was. We are going back next week to let them finish up the batch and to present them with a check for a job well done. So quilting and robots can go together...share the info about Sewing Edge with your quilting friends and we'll keep providing an opportunity for Alpine Robotics 159.

To find out more about the robotics visit the FIRST website where they have information about programs for elementary schools through high school.

To see some assembly line methods in action with sewing and quilting, watch our videos on the Clearview Method of Half-Square Triangles and Faster and Easier Seams.