May 9 Rotary Luncheon

 

President Elect Sandy Lane brought the meeting to order at 12:15 PM at Purkey’s Pink Apple with Ruth Gorski leading the Pledge of Allegiance and Dave Wilson giving the Invocation.

 

 

Ryan Zalewski - TAHS Robotics Team – guest speakers
Scott Howell - TAHS Robotics Team Faculty Mentor- guest speaker
Fred Harding - guest of Harry Sharpe - Founder of TAHS Robotic Club
Andres, John & Kike– exchange students

 

 

Ad Buck: Don Davis - June 6-8 at Mohegan Sun Dental Clinic needs volunteers on Fri and Sat.

 

 

The next Membership Mixer Event will be Thursday evening May 30th from 6pm – 8pm at Bogey’s Restaurant. 

 

Please return those suggested invitees forms that Pres. Mike handed out and respond to his recent similar e-mail request, as we need people to invite. 

 

Please contact Francine Kanyok with any setup questions / ideas / etc.

 

 

Our Officer Installation and Awards Banquet will be Thursday evening, June 20^th, starting at 5:30 PM at Shadowbrook.  There will be no noon meeting on that date, nor Flash Meeting that evening. 

 

Please contact Francine Kanyok with any setup questions / ideas / etc.

 

 

The next Board Meeting will be Tuesday, May 21st from 7:30 – 8:30 am at the new Towne & Country Grille in Tunkhannock.

 

 

The next Flash Meeting will be Thursday, May 16 at 5:30pm at Bogey’s.

 

 

 

 

 

Next Meeting will be Monday evening June 3 at 6pm at the Tunkhannock Library.

 

 

Club giving to the Rotary Foundation is currently per capita $252 per person, $293 per person. Please make your donation before the end of this Rotary years on June 30.

 

 

The Fireworks will be Wed evening July 3^rd at Memorial Stadium. Rain date is July 5^th.

 

 

Committee has reviewed the applications and finalizing the winners for scholarships to be presented at Senior Awards night on Thursday May 24.

 

 

The District newsletter went to all members last week, so see the newsletter to find out what is going on in our District.

 

Brochures for Rotary Leadership Institute given out by PE Sandy to anyone interested.

Prior to adjournment, Ruth Gorski led the recitation of the 4-Way Test by the attendees.

 

 

Scott Howell is the faculty advisor to the Robotics Club. The Club was started in 1997 by Fred Harding. In 2004-2005, Fred turned it over to Scott. The Robotics program is the best learning experience any student will have in their high school career.

 

The Club has 17 students participating of 1,000 students in the school. 11 volunteer adult mentors teaching mechanical design, electronics, and computer science. For the first time, five 8^th grade students are participating, so they will have 5 yrs experience when they graduate. 

 

They have 6 weeks to build their robot before competition.  At their first competition, they were the District Event Winner. This year there was also an autonomous computer-controlled component and they won the Autonomous Award sponsored by Ford. It was blinded, so they could not see the robot on the field, so they had to depend on the robot’s onboard camera system.

 

This year’s game was shown on Jan 5 as an animation entitled “Destination Deep Space” with 3 competitions. First they had to place hatches on cargo ships and then place balls inside the hatches at 3 different levels. Won first match, lost 2^nd match by 1 ball and 3^rd match by 2 balls. They showed us parts of the robot, the hatches and ball used in the competition.

 

In Detroit, they were an Archimedes Subdivision Finalist, this was the second highest ranking in the Club’s history.  They finished 12th at Detroit Championship. They ranked 6 out of 128 teams in First MidAtlantic District.

 

Ryan is a drive team member – he plans to go to college to major in Russian language. As a freshman, he wanted to be an astronaut and discovered his true passion with the team.  He was extremely introverted and shy and the team has helped him come out of his shell. He did pit scouting for the club, where he had to speak with people on where they are from and how they built their robot.

 

Andrzej, our exchange student from Poland, came to US in Aug. On his second day of school, he asked his counselor how to develop his computer skills and his counselor suggested the robotics club where he could learn how to code robots.  This gave him the opportunity to meet a lot of other teams, students and other mentors.  The Worlds competitions were a great experience for him to meet an even larger number of other teams and mentors from all over the world. As a coder, he gave the robot a "soul".

 

Andrzej (left) & Ryan with the gripper and hatch

 

Andrzej, Scott and Ryan with the Tigertron Club trophies and medals for 2019

 

Fred Harding was then asked to talk briefly about how the Robotics Club got started.  He recalled it started in 1997 from a small note in his mailbox from Kent Kresge. There were only 2 competition sites back then and now there are over 30 sites.  Now there are international teams from Taipei, Sweden, Canada, etc.  Rotary supported him in helping to get things going in the early years and he ran the Club for 10 years.  Then, he ran the competitions in several sites and had to control all the teams and volunteers. His very first team included Dia Siraki, who was a Rotary exchange student from Serbia (Hungary) and this year’s team now has Andrzej Swietek, our current Rotary exchanges student from Poland.

 

TAHS Robotics Club Founder Fred Harding

 

There were 2 weeks between the Mid-Atlantic and World championships. They had the opportunity to redesign the robot between these competitions.

 

After their presentation, Pres.-Elect Sandy Lane presented the Team with a check for $1,000 to help support the Robotics Club.