This year, one of our main goals was to step up our social media. When focused on meet preparation-related tasks, consistent social media posts were a struggle. With that being said, we made major improvements from last year not only in terms of frequency, but also the quality of the content itself. We also branched to new platforms including Tiktok and Discord. The team used discord and its abundance of gracious professionals willing to share their knowledge as an avenue to get help on the engineering of the bot, including the claw.

During this season we opened the robotics club to middle school members! We did this to give them the opportunity to see what a team would look like as well as helping the team out in the process!  Sticking to our goal from last year of incorporating the middle schoolers into the team. The middle schoolers have attended almost every single robotics club meeting, observing and working with the team closely.  They’ve brought a lot of excitement and new ideas, and it's been great to see them learn and help out. Having them on the team has made us even stronger, and we're excited to watch them grow in the club.

The team made a huge effort to seek out mentorships for the Whabam’s engineering team. To accomplish this, we met with NIU Robotics and Dr. Huzaifa from Depaul University. The multiple meetings with Dr. Huzaifa really helped the team; he mainly helped the coding team by giving insightful instructions on the autonomous mode and how to calibrate it. He also helped in accessing the IMU sensor on the robot. Through email outreach, we were able to organize a meeting with the Northern Illinois University Robotics Club. This meeting was a valuable opportunity to learn about the functional similarities and differences between two types of robotics clubs/teams. With each new connection, the eagerness to help others within the FIRST and broader STEM community became more apparent to us. We hope to use our similarities with NIU Robotics to organize meaningful collaborations in the future, particularly in the domain of developing team member skills.

A big concern going into this season was where our funding will come from since last year the school graciously sponsored the team. During the summer before this season, many members worked hard to get sponsorships by reaching out to various companies and individuals that have a background in STEM. The team was able to collect sponsorships to help fund the team. One of our main goals for next season is to keep on collecting sponsorship money to reach our full potential. The team has also started creating a sponsorship packet to make the process easier. Outreach has also looked into grants to apply for.

Sponsors are one of our top goals for the team, and we hope that over time, we will grow by gaining sponsorships.