04.24.20 Team E-blast

MDE Grant Update  l  SCECH Logs due April 30  l  FIRST Dashboard Regrants- June 30 deadline  l  FIRST in Michigan Awards Announcement on Facebook  l FIRST Virtual Showcase  l  PTC Onshape Challenge and FIRST in Michigan PTC Grant  l  1 Million PPE Challenge  l  Online Robotics Coding Camp  l   Note About E-Blasts

MDE GRANT UPDATE 

The Michigan Dept. of Education (MDE) announced that they are waiving the requirement that you must attend two FRC competitions or one FTC, FLL or FLL Jr competitions to satisfy the 2019-2020 MDE FIRST Robotics State Grant requirements if your events were canceled due to Governor Whitmer’s Executive Order 2020-11 issued on March 17, 2020. The order prohibited large gatherings and mandated the temporary closure of schools.

Notification of this decision was sent to all Local and Intermediate School District Superintendents and Public School Academy Directors. The memo can be found at this link: https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mde/FIRST_Robotics-Covid-19_686492_7.pdf.

Teams should connect with their school/district finance person before the end of the school year to work a plan on accessing/using the remaining 2019-2020 grant funds so your school does not transfer them into their general fund (which they cannot do under the terms of the grant anyway).

SCECHS LOGS DUE APRIL 30

Coaches and mentors that would like to submit FIRST Robotics Coaching Logs for State Continuing Education Clock Hours (SCECHs) should submit their logs to Ashley Arras at arrasa@michigan.gov for review and processing.

The event field on the log should be left blank. MDE will process the SCECHs applications beginning April 30. For more information and to download a SCECH log, visit  https://www.techplan.org/professional-development/first-robotics-sb-ceu/.

FIRST DASHBOARD REGRANTS – DEADLINE JUNE 30

Teams that have unused/excess grant funds in their FIRST Dashboard must apply to have those funds regranted to the team’s fiscal partner  (W9 is needed) before June 30 or the funds will revert to FIRST HQs general fund.

Regrants can be initiated through the team’s dashboard by clicking on the “Finance Options” button in the “Team Finances” section. Visit the FIRST regrants site page for more information on the regrant process including the link to apply for a regrant (bottom of page):   https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/regranting-process-procedures-and-w-9.

FIRST IN MICHIGAN AWARDS ANNOUNCEMENT ON FACEBOOK

FIRST in Michigan will announce the 15 Dean’s List Finalists, the Woodie Flowers Award winner, and the 29 District Chairman’s Award winners on Facebook Tuesday, April 28 at 7:00 pm. We may post it on YouTube as well. Details to follow. Please save the date!

FIRST VIRTUAL SHOWCASE

FIRST Virtual Showcase presented by Qualcomm will be taking place on May 2nd at 10:00 am on FIRSTtv– a gathering of the FIRST® community to recognize the achievements of FIRST teams, mentors, and volunteers around the world during the FIRST RISE powered by Star Wars: Force for Change season!

FIRST teams are a Force for Change. Use #FIRSTFFC to highlight your team’s favorite moments during the FIRST RISE season. Follow along as we compile these posts from our community around the world with FIRST RISE Rewind.

PTC ONSHAPE CHALLENGE AND FIRST IN MICHIGAN PTC GRANT

Please share this opportunity with team members and their families! PTC rolled out a virtual design competition called ROBOTS TO THE RESCUE to help teams learn to use Onshape, which is PTC’s FREE, online CAD system. Teams don’t download Onshape onto their computers, they simply open it in the cloud and use it! Best of all, like google docs, team members can collaborate or design on their own. It’s a great way to have some fun and learn CAD skills.  Over 350 teams have signed up to participate already. There is still plenty of time for your team to join in the fun.

Special FIRST in Michigan PTC grant. FTC and FRC teams that participate in Robots to the Rescue may apply for a FIRST in Michigan PTC grant to help with registration fees next season as well as the new FTC REV Control Hub for FTC teams. Please visit the FRC and FTC grant pages at firstinmichigan.org for details. We will give out six $1,000 awards to FRC teams and five $525 awards to FTC teams. These grants are completely separate from the Robots to the Rescue awards.

JOIN OUR 1 MILLION PPE CHALLENGE!

FIRST in Michigan launched the 1 MILLION PPE Challenge to provide much needed personal protection equipment (PPE) like face shields, face masks & accessories, and safety glasses to our hospitals and first responders and others in need of personal protection equipment. Our teams have collectively donated more than 44,000 pieces of PPE already!

I hope you and your team will join us if you haven’t already, or continue to do so if you are already participating!

NOW LET’S TAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL!

Ask all the teams within your school district to participate. FRC teams currently account for the bulk of all item donations.

Ask all the teams within your school district to participate. FRC teams currently account for the bulk of all item donations.

Ask your superintendent or principal to send an email to EVERY family in your district through your listserve to create and donate PPE under your team number. They can find the designs and who needs what right on our website.

Ask your sponsors and other companies to send an email to their employees. They can either donate under your team number or create a team of their own in their corporate name and have all of their employees log their item donations under that.

Carolyn Clifford from WXYZ is looking to do a story on our PPE Challenge and needs some great iPhone videos of the students making PPE. Please create your short videos and send them to me at gail.alpert@gmail.com with the subject line: PPE Challenge videos.

ONLINE ROBOTICS CODING CAMP

Amanda Gibbons with Breitung Township Schools created a great FREE, ONLINE robotics camp for students in grade 2 through high school. It utilizes Amazon Future Engineers and CODERZ for content.

Elementary students will get a chance to work on virtual LEGO EV3 Robots, middle school and high school students will be able to build basic robotics skills or learn advanced skills. This is self-paced, free, and open to all residents of Michigan. This is a great opportunity for our student body to learn more about robotics so they can participate in future activities.

Due to the intense demand from the FIRST community class seats filled quickly so Amanda just added 800 more seats. Some of our coaches/ mentors are using this to teach their virtual school classes.  Coaches and students should follow this link https://play.gocoderz.com:443/login/#/joinclass/blackstring and choose from the appropriate class levels.

Anyone experiencing errors should email Amanda at connect@kingsford.org and she will add capacity so that all students can participate.

NOTE ABOUT E-BLASTS

FIRST in Michigan FRC team e-blasts are sent to Lead Coach 1 and 2 for each team. The distribution list is pulled from the FIRST Team Registration System, per FIRST HQ protocol, so additional email addresses cannot be added to the e-blast list.