SHS’s FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics team, coming off of last year’s win of the state title, have a big year planned. However, building robots and winning titles is not all that the Cyber Cards do.

“(FIRST Robotics) is great for any kid who wants to be a professional in their life, and not just a professional engineer,” Mark Snodgrass, engineering teacher and Cyber Card advisor said.

Snodgrass expresses the importance of the members of the team who participate in other activities, such as creating advertisements, planning and writing. In recent years the Cyber Cards have added a blog on their website, at www.southportrobotics.org/blog-1. One of the goals of the blog is to highlight these members.

“Business professionals who give us money, our sponsors, parents, everyone around will look at this blog and try to gather information about us to see if they wanna work with us, or how we did things, or colleges like to look at it like a kid’s portfolio,” Snodgrass said. “We want kids to be the highlight of all of this, so when colleges and other people look at our website they really see what our team is all about.”

Jade Germann, a member of Cyber Cards, was an active writer on this blog last year. She expressed her enjoyment of it.

“I write for the Southport Robotics blog because I love to write. Finding what I wanted to do was a lot harder than I thought, so I went to the mentors and spoke to them about my interests.” Germann said. “They pointed me in the direction of programming and the blog, and I found that I was quite good at both.”

Members of the team can post reports, articles and other pieces about the strategy, progress and achievements of the team. Germann and Snodgrass emphasized the importance of the blog in communicating the Cyber Cards’ activities.

“It is important to write about our robotics team because it spreads the word about what we are doing that affects the community,” Germann said. “Overall, the website is a great resource for us to get information about the team out there and providing information for our sponsors to view.”