To share our passion and appreciation for STEM, Team Appreciate developed STEMConnect Programs, to reach beyond the FIRST community, and STEMConnect in a Box, to share this model with other FIRST teams. We create and utilize partnerships between FIRST® Teams to offer our STEMConnect Programs on sites of corporate sponsor locations for their employees’ children. STEMConnect in a Box has franchised the STEMConnect model, allowing other teams to rapidly adopt the partnership with their own sponsors. This initiative allows us to provide opportunities for sponsors beyond directly supporting STEM and gaining mentoring experience: They generate revenue for the team, an educational summer program option for parents, and most importantly, an enriching and inspiring experience for all of the students.

As we enter our eight year of STEMConnect, we continue to experience explosive growth! Through STEMConnect, 2468 students have taught 77 sessions for 1546 participants. Our success at the corporate level motivated our team to expand the model to our local community: in 2019, we held an additional 7 sessions at our own facilities in Eanes ISD. In the summer of 2020, to adapt to COVID-19, we held 5 virtual STEMConnect sessions in partnership with our school district, teaching an Introduction to Programming curricula. With the effects of COVID-19 spilling into 2021, we held virtual sessions in partnership with FRC 4400 Cerbotics in Mexico to further introduce students to STEMConnect in new communities.

Since its inception, STEMConnect has expanded exponentially. In our second year, we created a new partnership with Breakthrough Austin. Breakthrough is a non-profit organization that offers out-of-school learning opportunities to students in low-income communities who will be the first in their family to graduate from college. Freescale agreed to host at their facility and donate the registration fees so we could teach this camp at no cost to Breakthrough. Coming into our fifth summer, Qualcomm will host our 4th STEMConnect session with Breakthrough, and we have slots at Intel, NXP, Cirrus Logic, Qualcomm and Eanes ISD. We are excited to announce our reach to a total of over 1,500 STEMConnect attendees.