Help Texpand represent South Africa at WorldChamps

Two of our team members (Nikela Cele and Isa Adams) need funding to enable them to travel to the World Championships to compete as part of Team Texpand – the SA National Champions of the FIRST Tech Challenge robotics competition.

WE ONLY HAVE UNTIL MID MARCH TO RAISE THE FUNDS!

Personal message from Isa Adams (from Mitchell’s Plain): I always wanted to be a scientist since Grade R. Opportunities are hard to find in Mitchells Plain. The robotics club at my primary school provided a start, with mentoring from Texpand. I am now a novice coder for Texpand, the best robotics team in South Africa.

It will be life-changing if I can travel (overseas for the first time) and compete at the World Championships. One day I would like to bring robotics and coding to Mitchells Plain to inspire children to learn stem skills.

Personal message from Nikela (from Grabouw): I would love to help my team do well on a global stage. We have a great chance with the current robot since we did so well in the Nationals. I am excited to experience FTC on a global scale. I have always wanted to go overseas and experience other parts of the world. I also dream of studying at MIT since they are one of the best engineering schools in the world. This trips brings me closer to realising that dream. If we do well in the world championships we can inspire other young people to get involved in STEM and robotics.

The FTC competition provides challenging and exciting hands-on opportunities for high school students to develop practical stem skills while having fun. Each season, teams have a few months to build robots to compete in a timed game against other teams’ robots – kind of like robotic Olympic games - but each year the game is different.

However, for Texpand, FTC is more than a game - it is about growing in and expanding STEM skills – Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Team members have learnt and applied many concepts from the fields of physics, coding, applied mathematics, 3D design, design process, sensor integration and more. What they have learnt and applied, they have then taken out to teach and share with other emerging STEM teams and under-resourced communities around Cape Town - assisting and training primary school robotics teams in Athlone, running Robotics Activation workshops and drawing new apprentices into our team to develop them into future FTC team members. Texpand's mission is not only to represent South Africa on the world stage, but also to inspire and train other young South Africans in the STEM and robotics fields. So far Texpand has impacted over 500 youth through schools and organisations in Cape Town, assisted 35 emerging FTC teams around the world and launched 8 new Robotics teams. They are hungry to have an even greater impact!

To help make contributing as easy as possible, we have opened up a number of channels for you to make contributions. You can:

• Pay directly into our Texpand bank account. Texpand is a registered non-profit company.

• Make easy online payments by giving to this Back-a-buddy campaign

• Or, for SA companies, receive an 18A tax certificate for contributions by making payment to FIRST SA - a PBO who runs FTC and will pass all funds on to us (contact us to make that happen)

We have also developed a tiered sponsors structure for corporate sponsors, with varying levels of exposure and reward for their brand.

All the details for these options are available on our website sponsorship page.