Spreading FIRST Ideals:

We have worked to increase awareness of FIRST through emails, word of mouth, and by submitting articles about our teams to local news media to inform our communities. Team members have given interviews for WGIR "Tech Talk," WKXL and WMUR, each time sharing about FIRST. For five years, our team has compiled FIRST Trivia questions for BAE Systems to display between robot rounds at the Granite State Regional. Our team has given robot demos at Daniel Webster College's Camp RoboTech, Micronetics, the First Agape homeschool co-op where team members took classes, and even a Vacation Bible School! Mechanical Mayhem students presented two talks in the 2005 FIRST Robotics Conference that were presented again for BAE's rookie FLL coach training. In 2006, some graduated FLL students on our team were interviewed at FIRST Place, sharing their expertise for a research presentation training video that was distributed to all 2006 registered FLL teams. In 2007, our team released three FIRST promotional DVDs that are traveling around the country through a sport called geocaching. The "travel bugs" have traveled 9564 miles as of Feb. 2010. In 2008 we created a Facebook group for our team with a link to our team's website.

A Mechanical Mayhem graduate studying at Carnegie Mellon University has served as president of the Pittsburgh FIRST Alumni Association since January 2009 to spread FIRST knowledge and experience with high schools in the Pittsburgh area. At the 2009 FIRST Supplier's Summit we gave our suppliers the opportunity to drive our robot in matches. Because many FRC teams are sponsored by Sun Microsystems and use Java, we demoed last May at their Burlington, MA office to raise Sun employees' awareness of FIRST. At the New Hampshire High Tech Council 2009 Banquet, students spoke about and encouraged involvement in FIRST with business owners, entrepreneurs, and political figures totaling to about 250 people.

Below is a map of the conventions and demonstrations at which we have given presentations.

Since FIRST LEGO League was the origin of our team we have naturally taken to supporting the FLL program as much as we can. The main thing we have done is to menor FLL teams in our area. We have either mentored, coached, or in some way influenced the following teams:

Our team has also helped BAE Systems set up for the New Hampshire state tournament since 2005. We have also helped assemble the table parts for it and many of our team members have volunteered at the tournement. In addition several of our team members took over the production of the official FLL game videos in 2006 and 2007.