This season, follow along as we hear from 4 FIRST® LEGO® League, 4 FIRST® Tech Challenge, and 4 FIRST® Robotics Competition teams from around the world about their season experience and the culture of innovation their team has created.
In this post, we meet Team 3316 D-Bug from Tel-Aviv, Israel!
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Q: Can you give us a brief history of your team? What makes your team unique?
A: We are team D-Bug #3316 from D Municipal High School in Tel Aviv, Israel. Our team was founded in 2009 by a group of seniors who wanted an after-school extra-curricular STEM activity and started building a workshop in the school’s basement. In 2014 the team traveled to FIRST® championship for the first time, and the experience inspired us to take the mission of passing the STEM & innovation world to the next generation.
Throughout our journey, innovation has always been the core of our team’s spirit. Our mission is to spread the STEM world and the FIRST core values, with an emphasis on innovation to the next generations. That’s why our FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge teams are among the best ones in Israel, especially in the innovation field. In 2018 one of our teams made runner up in the GIA (Global Innovation Awards) finals. These alumni later came to D-Bug and mentored both of our FIRST LEGO League teams all the way to the 2021 GIA finals, making us the first school to send two teams to the world finals! Our alumni later came into leading roles in Israel’s many high-tech companies!
We may be a small team, but we have a huge family – including our team members, the young teams we mentor, the FIRST Robotics Competition teams we’re assisting, our parents, sponsors, alumni, mentors and the entire FIRST community in Israel and all around the world!
Q: How do you incorporate new team members and teach them the values of the team?
A: We host tours, activities and training in our workshop to the students in our school in order to recruit new members. This year we started the process all the way in May! But our recruitment plan doesn’t start there. 70% of our team members are FIRST LEGO League alumni, the journey of our family starts with the connections we build with our FIRST LEGO League teams over the values of teamwork, creativity and sharing our knowledge. We light the spark of innovation in each team we mentor. We put an emphasis on teaching them the values of FIRST through the FIRST LEGO League program and it’s outside of the box thinking and by that, ensure the next generations of D-Bug.
Q: This season is all about the role STEM plays in the arts. What are some ways your team ties creativity and art into your STEM activities? How is your team preparing for the upcoming season?
A: To prepare for the upcoming season, we’ve discussed the topic of arts, and more specifically how would it be possible to integrate it into the FIRST Robotics Competition game. For that reason, we’re working on creative ways to solve the FIRST Tech Challenge and FIRST LEGO League challenges on a FIRST Robotics Competition scale, since we know that every year there are similarities between the challenges.
One way we plan to incorporate arts into our activities is through our business plan. We plan to create an innovative presentation for potential sponsors, making it more artistic than our usual one.
At the end of each season we reflect on our work process, both on our team and our FIRST LEGO League teams. As soon as we saw that the new season is about arts we started searching for personal connections to the topic and how we could pass it on, through our teams and mentors. Since our work process for the innovation project is already organized, we quickly started meeting with our older FIRST LEGO League members, asked them about their hobbies, and together started looking for experts for them to meet. We look for composers, theater workers, artists and museum curators, all people that know how to convey messages in an artistic way, so that the kids can learn about the existing methods and options and find ways to innovate.
Q: What has been your biggest challenge so far?
A: Our biggest challenge this past season was recruiting new members, since Tel Aviv is a city full of opportunities for kids to partake in STEM and innovation projects, and many students in our school already engage in STEM activities such as MEET (MEET is an educational initiative focused on technology, entrepreneurship, and leadership that creates a powerful network of young Israeli and Palestinian leaders), taking university classes, etc. and can’t commit to D-Bug as well. We made it our goal to overcome this challenge by recruiting much earlier, starting right after the last competition, so that we could train the new members over summer and have a much more qualified team come September. In addition, every year 100% of our FIRST LEGO League alumni join our team.
