Recycling
Team 293 collects ink cartridges and cell phones and sends them off to a recycling plant. We have recycled hundreds of ink cartridges and cell phones! Collection boxes can be found in the Main Office of the Hopewell Valley Central High School and the Hopewell Branch of the Mercer Library.
Fundraising
Fundraising helps buy the team supplies like bolts and metal and lower the cost of going to competitions. Annual fundraisers include a car wash, Community Cleanup and Pennington Day. Pennington Day is a big fair that celebrates the local city of Pennington. A street is closed off and different community shops and clubs set up stands to sell their products. SPIKE annually builds a mini robot for a children's game at the fair. For example, last year we had a robot with a net attached that moved around as kids tried to score with small beanbags and hackey sacks. The previous years we had kids driving the robot around to knock over pins.
Community Service
Every year Team 293 participates in a community event to clean local roads called "Hopewell Cleanup Day". We always try to get as many members involved as possible, along with their families. Together with many families and organizations around town, we go out and pick up the trash on a local road.
Police Robot
In 2009 Team 293 was commissioned by the local police to create a robot they can use for target practice. The team eagerly took on this challenge as an opportunity to practice engineering for the real world and to show the community what we can do. After the competition season, members worked in the shop to build a robust, easy to use, easy to fix robot for target practice. Some challenges in doing this included making it easy enough for untrained police to operate and hardy enough to withstand long-term use. And of course it had to be bullet proof. After many prototypes and a couple failed targets, the team was able to design and build this target practice robot and dispatched it for police use.
Team 293 collects ink cartridges and cell phones and sends them off to a recycling plant. We have recycled hundreds of ink cartridges and cell phones! Collection boxes can be found in the Main Office of the Hopewell Valley Central High School and the Hopewell Branch of the Mercer Library.
Fundraising
Fundraising helps buy the team supplies like bolts and metal and lower the cost of going to competitions. Annual fundraisers include a car wash, Community Cleanup and Pennington Day. Pennington Day is a big fair that celebrates the local city of Pennington. A street is closed off and different community shops and clubs set up stands to sell their products. SPIKE annually builds a mini robot for a children's game at the fair. For example, last year we had a robot with a net attached that moved around as kids tried to score with small beanbags and hackey sacks. The previous years we had kids driving the robot around to knock over pins.
Community Service
Every year Team 293 participates in a community event to clean local roads called "Hopewell Cleanup Day". We always try to get as many members involved as possible, along with their families. Together with many families and organizations around town, we go out and pick up the trash on a local road.
Police Robot
In 2009 Team 293 was commissioned by the local police to create a robot they can use for target practice. The team eagerly took on this challenge as an opportunity to practice engineering for the real world and to show the community what we can do. After the competition season, members worked in the shop to build a robust, easy to use, easy to fix robot for target practice. Some challenges in doing this included making it easy enough for untrained police to operate and hardy enough to withstand long-term use. And of course it had to be bullet proof. After many prototypes and a couple failed targets, the team was able to design and build this target practice robot and dispatched it for police use.
Hopewell Valley Central High School FIRST
Robotics Team 293 SPIKE. 
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