Author: admin

Happy Holidays!

As the year comes to an end, and our team is on winter break, the shop has slowed in traffic, and we wish everyone a safe and very happy holidays!

Despite this being Munster High School’s final exams week and the final week before winter break, our team still continued to work hard. On Monday, December 17th, our team had an event at the Munster Public Library open to the complete public. With such a large audience, we were very enthusiastic about the presentation. We demonstrated our robots from this past season and 2014. We then talked to them about the FIRST programs accessible to them in this area for their age, and we concluded the program with an activity about the conduction of electricity. With the large turnout, our team is looking forward to a very large team in the years to come.

After finishing all of our training for new members, our team has started to take a break until build season begins. Additionally, on Monday, December 10th, our team had a presentation, demonstration, and activity to do with our local Scouts. Ranging from kids to adults, we demonstrated some of our robots from previous seasons, and we did an activity with the kids that showed how electricity was conducted. It proved to be both financially feasible for the team, as well as entertaining for the children. With a large audience, the team loved the energy in the room, and we look forward to our next community event.

This week, on the 7th and the 10th, our team had tool training for our new members to become more familiar with our shop. It was very successful with many members participating and learning.  Our team is looking forward towards a successful build season this following year. It was a fun meeting for our veterans and new members. We are all looking forward to the new friends we will meet this year throughout the team.

Happy Halloween from Munster Horsepower!

 This week our team did not have meetings due to our usual meetings on Wednesday being on Halloween this year and Friday’s meeting being on the day approaching Fall Break. Our team is almost done will our fall cleaning for the upcoming season, with just a few adjustments left to go. We are very enthusiastic to assimilate our new members over the next couple weeks.

This week, on October 24th, our team visited Bionic Prosthetics & Orthotics at their office in Merrillville. Here, we had the opportunity to learn about the consultation process for those in need of prosthesis and the manufacturing process as to how the prosthesis are made. Our team learned a lot of interesting facts, such as 7% of prosthesis are for the upper body and users must learn how to rework muscles in order to trigger the prosthetic part to move and carry out their everyday needs. We thank them for the great opportunity to learn and create such a meaningful connection. It was such a wonderful experience that we hope will help nurture a connection for the future.

This week, our team took the opportunity to reorganize the shop, seeing the slow down in activity in between the last safety meeting and upcoming tool training. Having been a team for 10 years now, we have acquired a lot of materials and unfortunately, we can’t keep it all. We will be recycling excessive aluminum and recirculating this money back into the shop, and extra wood will be used to help the PLTW classes with their projects. Even after this second week of cleaning, the process still isn’t finished, so we will continue cleaning this following week.

We give a special thanks to our new mentor, Mr. Craig, for building racks to carry our wood & metal supplies.

On September 25th, our team met with student and parents at Highland High School to help them start an FRC team for this upcoming season and hopefully the years to come. We are extremely delighted to be working along side Team Hammond (#71) to help raise Highland HS to reach their greatest potential. Highland had a wonderful turnout of students, and we are looking forward to working with the new team at competitions and in the community. We are also very excited to be adding another team to our Northwest Indiana region.

On Sunday, September 16th, our team attended the Valparaiso World Cultural Festival where we set up a booth to represent robotics teams from all over the world.  We were approached by many children and adults who were interested in seeing what FIRST is about.  We presented them with a map showing FRC team locations from all over the world based on population of teams. This opportunity also helped our team realize the great experiences we have gained through FIRST’s program, and how beneficial it is that countries at conflict with each other have a way of coming together at these competitions to work together and truly understanding one another.

World Fest

This week, we started to welcome our new members at our call-out meeting! At this meeting, we said good-bye to our previous faculty sponsor, Mrs. Govert, to welcome our new sponsor, Mr. Knight, along with the newly interested students. While Mrs. Govert is no longer our faculty sponsor, she is still happy to support this team and will continue working with us. Additionally, at our call-out meeting, we introduced our team officers along with the ideas and objectives of our club. Munster Horsepower is also proud to say that we had a turnout of more than 30 students at our call-out meeting, thus expecting a great, booming season!

Following our call-out meeting on the 13th, we had a fundraiser at Chipotle, raising around $100. On September 14th, our team was present at the school’s football game as well. Here, we sold glow sticks along with glow-in-the-dark horses that represent our school.

If you are interested in a fundraiser our sponsorship with our team, please check the bottom of the page for contact information.