Nemesis Wins The Engineering Inspiration Award For the Second Time In Team History!

At the Mount Olive district event, Nemesis 2590 won the prestigious Engineering Inspiration Award. This award was given to Nemesis as a result of our relentless outreach to the Community locally, statewide, and even globally. Our team is highly active, with many outreach programs created, supported, and run by us. One of our primary efforts locally is Discovery and Engineering day, which spreads STEM to young students in our community. We work with the students, in elementary school for Discovery day, and middle school for Engineering day, to complete challenges as both mentors and students assist them to reach the end goal. During the covid pandemic, we did not want to end this long-standing Nemesis tradition, so we made it virtual! We held an online Discovery day, offering students the opportunity to complete kits at home, with tutorials created by team members to assist them in their efforts. Students posted results to our Facebook page with many students sporting impressive results! Ultimately, we were asked to assist other STEM clubs at our school to hold online events, reaching over 70 students. 

Nemesis works every season to put an excellent robot on the field, but it would be nothing without our supportive community! In order to give back to our community, we host a sponsor night, where we invite sponsors, parents, and other members of our community, to hear about all of the great achievements we have attained. We recently held our 2022 sponsor night, which was very successful, and we look forward to maintaining this tradition in the future. Additionally, we collaborate with our local school district to hold an annual food drive, where we work with 4th-grade classes to raise supplies for local food banks. Nemesis offers the class that donates the most food, a demonstration of the robot, delivered by our students. This simultaneously raises food for those less fortunate, and spreads STEM to young students, increasing their interest in joining robotics teams in the future, both FLL and Nemesis itself.

Nemesis understands that the opportunities to spread STEM stretch beyond our local community. We worked with our state assemblyman, Daniel Benson, to pass a bill to distribute funding to 12 districts, with the goal of starting new robotics teams all across New Jersey. These teams will primarily be located in underserved communities that traditionally could not afford to have a robotics team. We started with a joint legislative resolution for the Robbinsville town council, urging our state assembly to take action to increase the number of robotics teams within New Jersey. Following this, we worked with Daniel Benson to move this bill to be in front of the State legislature for a vote. Members of our team gave written and oral testimony to the state assembly and senate. We additionally held preparation sessions for other teams to do the same. The bill passed unanimously in all votes it was a part of, and Governor Phil Murphy signed the bill into law on December 21, 2021. Our team continues to work with FIRST Mid-Atlantic, and the teams that helped us pass the bill, to attain the funding needed for this bill. 

Our team has done numerous outreach events for our community domestically, so when the opportunity arose for us to expand internationally, we jumped at the opportunity to expand STEM to new horizons. We worked with our sponsor ITIAH and the nonprofit ITIAH Angels for Learning to send STEM challenges to students in HAITI. We have fostered this relationship for years, sending kits to Haiti, Panama, and Kenya. We have recently put together 200 STEM kits to send to students in both the House of Hope Orphanage and the Ecole Mere Louise school in Haiti. In addition to STEM kits, we are sending food, clothing, sports equipment, and legos. We fostered our relationship with our local community by holding a lego drive, which raised over 15,000 legos to send to students in Panama. Overall, our team relentlessly works to make sure that we continue to expand our outreach to our community and beyond, making sure STEM reaches as far and wide as it can.