On January 8, the team received a new challenge for a new Build Season. We are excited about designing a robot that can handle cargo and traverse at least one level!

Our scrappy pirates traveled to our first competition played with our 2020 robot. Each of our members, new and veteran, got a chance to be on the drive team. Our goal was to get our new members experience with competition and prepared for the coming 2022 season. Some of our highlights:

We made it quarter finals with Wildcats & Flying Hedgehogs(paired teams) and Iron Mustangs!!!

The Scalawags were part of the first triple climb of the day!

We got to talk to new members on other teams and got in touch with some other team presidents.

What is it about planning activities with solar power that brings overcast skies??? Jr Robotics in August was all about building solar ovens for s’mores. So, naturally, it was overcast and misty that day! Even when the team made the world’s largest solar oven the following week… the sun disappeared! Luckily, s’mores are almost as good raw as they are melted!

Many thanks to Conversion Brewing for donating personal pizza boxes to our Jr Robotics lesson!

In early August, the Scalawags were able to complete one of our favorite forms of community service: teaching STEAM lessons to younger kids! We traveled to Girl Scout Day Camp and taught them about the energy stored in rubber bands. Working with about 60 girls in groups of ten, the Scalawags led them in building paddle boats. The best part, of course, was testing the finished product in the water!

At National Night Out we let kids drive the demonstration Robot Percy and we talked to family’s. Percy shot a couple t-shirts. The team did a lot a talking with the public. We got two checks one from the Lebanon Optimists and Dala Johnson wrote us a personal check. Dala also bought the students dinner, which we highly appreciated.

Darling Doubloon, Ghost Writer

The Scalawags earn money by having team carwashes and can drives. From the can drives we have earned $900 since April, which is enough for about five kids to go out of town for a weekend of competition. The car washes have been successful, and we really enjoy seeing the public and telling them what we do. Afterward, we usually get otter pops or ice cream, and some times even lemonade from our sponsor, North Santiam Coffee Company! We always appreciate the parents helping. We didn’t schedule a carwash for July, so there will probably be one in August.

Darlin’ Doubloon, Ghostwriter

The last few weeks we have been helping at summer school at the LHS and 7 oak. At seven oak we showed them how we built Percy. At 7 oak we let the kids drive Percy and show them how the t-shirt cannon works with a dish towel. At LHS we focused on building hardware and writing code for VEX robots in Mr. Helland’s robotics class. Scalawags’ team members worked side by side with the kids through all of these things.