Category

Updates

Unified Robotics Board of Advisors

By | Announcements, Updates | No Comments

During the fall of 2015, FIRST Robotics Competition Team 4911 CyberKnights founded the offshoot program Unified Robotics. Originally centered around the partnership between students at King’s and students with special needs at Roosevelt High School, the program has amassed an extensive network of participants and supporters that spans across the entire nation.

Such growth, however, only remains manageable when supervised by exceptional leaders who are in turn guided  by exceptional advisors. Starting this 2017 Unified Robotics season, a select few will form a counsel aimed at providing professional input to the Unified Robotics program.

Although our program intends to remain firmly rooted in its foundation of student leadership, guidance will be provided by experts and leaders in the STEM field. Through this, we hope to further nurture a combination of energetic ingenuity and informed management.

On August 9th, representatives from Unified Robotics discussed the logistics and future direction of Unified Robotics with this newly formed team called the Unified Robotics Board of Advisors. The Board includes industry leaders, advocates and policymakers, key supporters of the program, as well as key student leads and mentors involved in the development of Unified Robotics:

  • Jennifer Annable, Executive Director, Academy for Precision Learning
  • Jeff Black, CFO, Orion Industries
  • Will Daugherty, President and CEO, Pacific Science Center
  • Dr. Jennifer Fung, Research Scientist and Instructor, University of Washington Haring Center
  • Lauren Feaux, Special Needs Community Advocate, Microsoft retiree
  • Joe Hampson, VP Sports and Community Outreach, Special Olympics Washington
  • Jeff Hansen, Brand Strategy, Microsoft
  • Andrew LaPrade, Unified Robotics Student Lead, King’s High School
  • Dave Lenox, CEO, Special Olympics Washington
  • Donna Lew, Director and Coach of Robotics Team 488 xbot, Franklin High School
  • Laurie Machida, Unified Robotics Student Lead, King’s High School
  • Michael Mattmiller, CTO, City of Seattle
  • Erin McCallum, President, FIRST Washington
  • José Oglesby, Special Needs Community Advocate, Unified Robotics Coach at Ballard High School, Microsoft retiree
  • David Perry, Executive Director, Oregon FIRST Robotics
  • Traci Ratzliff, Legislative Analyst, Seattle City Council
  • Dr. Gary Stobbe, Board Certified Neurologist and Medical Director of University of Washington Medicine Adult Autism Clinic
  • Mike Thompson, Educator and Coach of Robotics Team 4911 CyberKnights, King’s High School
  • Tom Vertetis, Managing Partner, PCVA Law
  • Cameron Foster, President, REIGN Sports Management
  • Noelle Foster, Mentor for Team 4911 CyberKnights and Unified Robotics
  • Delaney Foster, Founder of Unified Robotics, Student at George Washington University

Post-meeting, a few of our revised goals include, but are not limited to: focusing on growth via sustainability versus expansion, creating Unified Robotics alum networks, and providing new teams with proper instruction regarding the planning of a proper season.

With our new guidance, we, as a team, find ourselves more confident in our ability to organize this upcoming season, which in turn enables us to better reach out to fledgling Unified Robotics teams in Washington and other states. With this in mind, look forward to upcoming guidebooks and other tutorials that will detail how we organized and executed our 2016 Unified Robotics season!

Planning in Special Olympics Unified Robotics

By | Updates | No Comments

Written by Sammy Murphy, a member of the Unified Robotics Leadership Club.

As we move through life, each of us on individual paths, we tend to gloss over the intricate details building the programs, places and people around us. When I first joined Unified Robotics, I possessed an idea of the immense amount work necessary to run the program. I imagined weekly sessions, careful correspondence, and checklists–all stereotypical activities associated with management. In many ways, this idea proved to be accurate in that these activities transpired. Yet, my vision of Unified Robotics lacked a full grasp of the complexity found within Unified Robotics
Read More

Unity within the Election

By | Updates | No Comments

Written by Sammy Murphy, a member of the Unified Robotics Leadership Club.

Since the past week riots and protests have rumbled through the streets of my hometown Seattle. Flags burn and windows shatter as protestors march to the beat of “Not my president, not my president.” while Trump supporters roll their eyes and  demand that protestors “suck it up.” Either in triumph or terror, the American people cry out recklessly in the wake of the election.
Read More

Upgrade Your Game Event

By | Updates | No Comments

Special Olympics International and Microsoft invited Unified Robotics™ to participate in a demo about the program. Several members of the CyberKnights, who participated as peer mentors at Unified Robotics™ in its pilot season, attended this event in order to share and expand the program to more schools and individuals with Intellectual Disabilities. Read More

What is Unified Robotics™?

By | Updates | No Comments

Unified Robotics™ is a student-designed and implemented robotics program open to students with, and without, intellectual disabilities (ID), as well as students with a variety of learning and behavior challenges. Unified Robotics includes an equal number of participants as robotics team “peer mentors” to train, strategize and compete.

Unified Robotics the first of its kind and brings the world of STEM and the sport of robotics to more high school students interested in STEM – including many students who are often excluded from extracurricular activities. Peer mentors from a FIRST® Robotics team work one-on-one with students with ID to build robots using EV3 kits made by LEGO®. Small teams of four students create their own robot including designing, building, and programming the robot. At the final tournament-style competition, each team presents their robot and its features, and competes in a new game created each year.

Unified Robotics was piloted last fall with four Seattle high schools, and had fantastic results, generating significant media attention, locally and nationally. Delaney Foster, CEO of the CyberKnights, a FIRST Robotics Competition Team (4911), is the founder and designer of the program. She was inspired by Special Olympics® Unified Sports® programs to create a robotics program that her sister, Kendall, who has autism and ID, could participate in. The CyberKnights ran the first season of Unified Robotics at Kendall’s school, Roosevelt High School, in Seattle. Students with special needs from two other Seattle public high schools joined together on this team. In the fall of 2016, Unified Robotics expanded to several other Seattle area high schools so that the final competition would be an inter-school tournament.

The CyberKnights, Special Olympics, and FIRST are currently working together to form a strategic partnership to expand the Unified Robotics program to the national level. In addition, Special Olympics is talking with the WIAA (Washington Interscholastic Activities Association) to recognize Unified Robotics as a sanctioned high school program, and develop a state tournament format. Plans are in motion to introduce Unified Robotics to the world at the 2018 USA Games, televised by ESPN. The CyberKnights have created a Unified Robotics Guidebook and are working with other FIRST Robotics teams to form a Unified Robotics Alliance, a coalition which is committed to fostering acceptance, equity and inclusion in their schools. In April, Delaney and her team presented Unified Robotics at the FIRST Robotics World Championship in St. Louis.

Unified Robotics helps bring together students of diverse populations and abilities as teammates and competitors on the field of play – providing leadership opportunities and paving the way for social inclusion community wide. There has been a dramatic transformation in all the students involved in this program, the participants and the peer mentors. “Creating the norm,” is a term Delaney uses to explain her vision for the near future when she and her teammates will be in leadership positions in STEM industries, and will be actively promoting neuro-diverse hiring policies, and workplace accommodation and adaptation. Through experiences like Unified Robotics, students are breaking down stereotypes around individuals with ID and other learning & behavioral challenges, as well as stereotypes which exist in STEM.