Registration is open!
The 2019 293 SPIKE Make-a-thon registration is open! Register your team ASAP: Due to facility limitations, registration is limited to 40 teams. Plus, if you are one of the first ten teams to register, you will recieve an Early Bird discount of $15!
Overview
The 293 SPIKE MAKE-A-THON is a one week engineering-design challenge for teams of 1-5 competitors. The competition is open to people of all ages and ability levels, and is a key feature of 293 SPIKE’s Inspiration Initiative.
Competition Details
Teams of 1-5 people will be able to register for a fee. The challenge will be revealed at a kick-off event at 6 p.m. on Friday, September 20th, at Hopewell Valley Central High School. Facilities for creation will be available to each team. Food will also be provided for the rest of the night to create a collaborative environment for teams to brainstorm together or separately.
At 10 a.m, on Saturday, September 28th, teams will reconvene at HVCHS for the wrap-up event to present their ideas, designs, and/or prototypes in an expo setting. A panel of judges will circulate the expo and select winning solutions. Winners will receive awesome prizes, which will be announced closer to the event. Adjacent to this expo will be the SPIKE Innovation Fair, a community STEM event open and free to the public. Participants and visitors alike can see other solutions to the challenge, engage with each other, and explore a variety of local STEM and ALS organizations.
Please keep in mind that more details will be made available and the details above are subject to change. Check back with this site for updates, and sign up for the interest list to get email updates.
Engineering with a Purpose
Besides being a fun community event, the 293 SPIKE MAKE-A-THON serves 293 SPIKE’s Inspiration efforts, which aim to increase awareness and interest in STEM and extend the benefits of STEM in its community. By not only being available to high school age groups, but also to middle school students, elementary school students, and adults who aged out of FIRST or have never been exposed to FIRST, the Make-a-thon engages completely new groups in the FIRST style of STEM education. This will hopefully form lasting connections with people, inspiring them to become involved in FIRST or the STEM community in general.
The 293 SPIKE MAKE-A-THON not only aims to bring a diversity of age into local STEM, but also to make STEM available to communities that would not otherwise have access to it. 293 SPIKE plans on supporting its participants in as many ways as possible, including waiving the registration fee for teams that demonstrate need.
Finally, the SPIKE Make-A-Thon aims to raise awareness of ALS and better the lives of ALS patients and their families. 293 SPIKE is working with HARK, an ALS non-profit that aims to ease the lives of those living with an ALS patient, Sara Cooper, a local business proffessional who suffers from ALS, and several other ALS-related organizations in order to ensure that the Make-a-thon has the greatest impact possible.
Overall, the 293 SPIKE MAKE-A-THON will further serve 293 SPIKE’s core value of pushing for better. We will better ourselves through an engineering design challenge, we will better community STEM by making that challenge accessible to everyone, and we will better our greater community building our event around kindness, generosity, and gracious professionalism.