Save the Music Festival By Rebecca Jiang Finding success in having a booth at the Save the Music Festival last year in 2017, we returned to the same annual festival this October of 2018. The Save the Music Festival is a fair familiar to almost everyone in the Belmont and San Carlos neighborhoods, where attendees go to experience the music of local bands, high school choirs, and even college marching bands. The festival’s goal is to raise money for the underfunded music programs within the elementary and middle schools of Belmont and Redwood Shores, and also gives the opportunity to highlight other extracurricular offerings for the K-12 kids who often attend the event, including visual art and robotics.
We had several team members attend, to showcase not only our robot from the past season but also the various ways kids could gain access to our robotics team and workshops. We had impactful conversations with parents, who especially asked about the reasoning behind our name “Dry Ice”, to which we responded with our explanation that our name was an acronym that represented the engineering principles we operate from: “Don’t Repeat Yourself, Innovative Creative Engineering”. A lot of the people that visited our booth were also curious about what FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics was and how it was different from other robotics programs such as FRC. Conveniently, there were a few local high school FIRST Robotics Competition Teams set up next to our booth, so we were able to collaborate in explaining to interested attendees on the similarities and differences between the programs. We introduced the 2018-2019 season game, Rover Ruckus, and displayed the highlights of our last season, including our experience at the Houston World Championships and videos of our matches.
We were able to especially further our upheld ideal of gracious professionalism and extend our team’s passion for robotics by speaking to the young children at the event, who seemed to take interest in attending our team’s workshops. We were also able to speak with the local elementary and middle school robotics teams that were at the fair, in hopes of offering their students access to robotics when they grow older through joining our team.