Madison Park Trip

Last Thursday, October 29th, I took some team members to Madison Park Elementary school for their High School Night. It was a recruiting trip to find new member for the robotics team and to promote the Marine Science program at Carl Hayden. I saw some colleagues from Camelback High School. They just started an engineering magnet program. The are using Vex robots. They aren't doing FRC this year, but they hope to get it going again next year. They were interested in doing NURC. I spoke with a counselor from Fairfax, my kid's home school, and I didn't know they had an engineering magnet. I was jealous of the kids at EVIT, they have their own 3-d printer. And their 3-d graphics program is really cool. The 8th grade kids are so young. They get younger every year. Except for the boys that hassled Elizabeth, we enjoyed our trip.

Rail Fair

We spent Saturday and Sunday, October 9th and 10th, at the Scottsdale Rail Fair. They have a new building and are construction several more model rail road tracks. We spent some time talking to the model rail road club members about how they build the tracks. Most of the tracks were about half build, so it was really cool to see what goes in to making them - usually you just look finished product and have no idea what goes into making it.

I was happy that my parents, wife, kids, brother, sister, and several nieces and nephews got to meet the team. My father was particularly impressed with Martin.

I spoke with a gentleman for 20 minutes on Saturday. His family tired of waiting for him and just left him. We discussed robotics, technology, and education. Then he told me he was the chief information officer for Fender (the guitar company). I was impressed!

The team must have talked to several hundred people over the weekend. I received many positive comments about the team members.

Special kudos goes to Maria how was kind to a person who was having a bad day.