2012 Rochester Hometown Christmas Parade Recap

This Sunday, December 2nd, the AdamBots, along with some students from team 33,  The Killer Bees from Notre Dame Prepatory School and team 201, the Feds, from Rochester High School, walked in the 2012 Rochester Hometown Christmas Parade.

The theme for this year’s parade was “Inside Santa’s Workshop,” and our float committee created a float that incorporated both steampunk and Santa’s workshop elements. During the parade, there were AdamBots performing different jobs of elves in Santa’s workshop, such as “making” presents in our mobile steampunk workshop. Some were even dressed as toys, such as a life-size toy monkey and WALL-E.

While making the float took the float committee, comprised of workers from all three participating schools, a long time and a lot of effort to make, it payed off as we had another award-winning float and had a great time celebrating the holidays and spreading the joys of robotics and Christmas throughout downtown Rochester. As always the parade was great fun and we hope to do it again in the future.

The AdamBots also helped represent the Leader Dogs for the Blind group at the parade, a group that we are closely connected with. The Leader Dogs group included two AdamBots, some future leader dogs, and their volunteer raisers, including AdamBots mentors Mr. & Mrs. McBride. The work these leader dogs and their raisers do is invaluable and we cannot thank them enough. 

Overall, the parade was a great outreach event and luckily the weather didn’t get as cold and rainy as it could have. The city of Rochester was full of Christmas spirit and so were the AdamBots. It was an excellent wrap-up to another great year of community outreach for the AdamBots, the Feds, and the Killer Bees.

In other news, both FTC teams at Van Hoosen, the middle school next to Adams, have been performing well in recent contests. In a recent FTC tournament this Saturday in Bedford, MI, both Van Hoosen teams (5381- Viko-Pyschos and 6348- Thunder Blades) made the playoffs (the top field of 8). Overall, the Thunder Blades were ranked 7th and made it to the semi-finals. The Viko-Pyschos ranked 3rd and lost in the finals for the second time in 2 weeks. The Viko-Pyschos were also nominated for several awards, and received trophies for being a finalist (2nd place), being a captain in the finals, and the PTC Award for robotic design. In addition to team awards, Mr. Jakey was awarded the Compass Award for outstanding mentor. Keep up the good work FTC teams!

Also, OCCRA will be wrapped up next Wednesday with the OCCRA banquet. OCCRA has been a great experience for students and mentors, both freshman and veteran, and the banquet should be a nice end to the season; especially as we have been nominated for the prestigious Foundation Award, which we also won last year.

With the end of OCCRA comes the beginning of FIRST. On Tuesday, November 27th, students were assigned their new sub-teams for the FIRST season. Many of the team members decided to join more sub-teams to gain more experience in the subjects. The first year students on the team who attended the New Student Workshops were mostly assigned to the build team(s) of their preference while others decided to try out some non engineering sub-teams. Our very first meeting for the FIRST season will be held on Thursday, December 6th and both parents and students will attend the meeting to help prepare them for FIRST in second semester.

Stay tuned for more weekly AdamBots updates every Sunday!