Community Involvement
MARS/WARS has year round activities for students. In an effort to expose as many students as possible to FIRST Robotics and opportunities in STEAM, our team encourages any interested student to attend fall build sessions, outreach programs, and special events. This allows students who may not be able to meet the time commitment to a build season because of jobs or other activities to learn valuable STEAM skills and know that they are always welcome to join in. We encourage our new members to become active participants in our MarsCars outreach program. Our team welcomes home school and students from high schools that do not have a FIRST Robotics team to become part of the MARS/WARS family.
FIRST LEGO League
FIRST LEGO League is another one of FIRST's STEAM programs that targets a younger generation of students. Students in FLL range from 9-16 years old and tackle a similar hands on Challenge along with a Project portion. These two elements has the students using their critical thinking skills in multiple ways to help show the impact they can have and challenges they can conquer with STEAM concepts.
Checkout how MARS/WARS has helped support the local Metamora FLL Team, The Monkey Wrenches here!
Career Spark
Career Spark is a program offered by the Greater Peoria Economic Development Council and Junior Achievement of Central Illinois. The aim is simple: educate our region’s high schoolers about the career opportunities readily available to them in central Illinois. Students will be exposed to participating companies and their existing available jobs.
Checkout MARS/WARS's involvement with the Career Spark program here!
- Greater Peoria Economic Development Council
MARS SPARKS Outreach Program
The MARS/WARS Outreach Program, MARS SPARKS (Students Promoting Arts, Robotics, Knowledge and STEM) was created in the 2022 season by the Business Services Team. The goal of this program is to spread the awareness of FIRST and all the STEAM fields to local youth community groups. The program consists of hands-on activities for the children to learn about mechanical, modeling, programming, electrical, and marketing. The program also includes time for the kids to drive minibots and see the current season's robot.
If you have a group, team, club, organization, etc. that might be interested, please feel free to reach out. Click here to find the team's contact information.
