draft.

see:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N2wEcHMJOUOr8nOcmMPOZnExGp6I3BkH49RZXjAwNaE/edit?usp=sharing

Robotics Team / Repair Event Collaboration

This resource is intended to help high school robotics teams and repair event organizers successfully integrate robotics team members into community repair events.

Berkeley High School’s Robotics Team members participated as volunteer fixers at three large community repair events in 2024 - 2026. 

Berkelium 5419 has a reputation for being an aggressive force in FIRST competitions. Joining the team of adult volunteer fixers offered students the opportunity to leverage the skills and knowledge they’d developed for competition, toward repairing community members’ broken objects.

As part of their multifaceted repair program, Berkeley Unified School District hosted large community repair events they called Fix-It Fests. The events were generally consistent in format and philosophy to most Repair Cafés, Restart Parties, Fixit Clinics, and other independent repair events. (See How to Start One) Each event was supported by 30 - 40 adult fixer volunteers and 15 - 20 adult host volunteers, and attended by some 200 participants.

This resource was created by the counterparts on the collaboration, Hazel Lutzker, robotics team business lead, and Vita Wells, a member of the Fix-It Fest organizing committee. In it we lay out what we did, why and how we did it, and what we learned along the way, in the hopes that it will inspire and help other robotics teams and repair event organizers to collaborate.

Check out Hazel’s Note from the Field about the Team’s participation.

Benefits of Integrating Robotics Team Members into Community Repair Events

Benefits to the Team:

And:

Learn about the transferability of skills and knowledge from the competitive arena to the larger world

Join in something wildly popular with the school and community! And tons of fun! Check it out!

Benefits to the Repair Event Organizers:

• Engage young people in the repair movement

• Diversify volunteer demographics beyond the OG repair community

• Expand the visibility of repair in the community

• Develop community goodwill through offering youth opportunities for skills development, community service and environmental action

• Give adult fixer volunteers the opportunity to teach and mentor youth

Tasks to Complete Before the Event

Robotics Team - Pre-Event

• Maintain good communication with the event organizer through the weeks leading up to the event

• Identify which team members will participate

• Ensure parents have completed event waiver forms for all participants

• Students under 18 arriving without a signed waiver will not be allowed into the work area

• Determine what tools and supplies will be required

• Line up transportation for tools and supplies, to and from

• Create marketing materials:

• Posters, banners

• Take-away leaflets

• Communicate with the event organizers if special equipment is needed for either the fixer or marketing function

• Ensure team members:

• Have transportation lined up

• Know the day’s schedule

Repair Offers Rich Teaching Opportunities in the Classroom

Teaching about repair can expand the scope of what’s already being taught, develop new ways of approaching and considering topics, advance thinking and fine motor skills, and link learning across subjects, and to students’ lives.

In hands-on fixing, students approach what's broken, dig into and understand what it’s made of, explore how it works, and find something not seen before — an opening of possibility — identifying a point and mode of intervention, and putting the broken object into working order.

Repair becomes an experiential model for approaching and engaging with problems — material, conceptual or social, small to large scale — and education becomes relevant, rooted, rigorous, and restorative. 

Repair involves a wide range of thinking skills, draws from multiple subjects central to the goals of education, and supports developing a repair mindset grounded in care [See Note 1 below]: 

Educators’ objectives in Makerspace / STEM / CTE classes, and in environmental literacy programs, are particularly well-aligned with repair’s educational possibilities. Those classes and programs are therefore particularly promising points of entry for bringing repair into schools.

Bringing repair into the classroom:

• Extends the visibility of repair into the community far beyond the reach of community repair events

• Strengthens and legitimizes the repair message through the authority lent by the school’s authority

• Shapes young minds

• Reaches across generations

Objectives and Obstacles:
Solutions Through Collaboration

Educators

You want to enrich your teaching through exploiting the educational opportunities offered by repair.

You have:

• Students!

• Classroom learning scaffolding and the larger educational context

• Access to administrative and intramural systems and resources

Repair Advocates

You want to expand the range and impact of the repair movement.

You have:

• Technical expertise

• Volunteers — additional adults in the classroom

• Teaching resources — Educator Resource Library

• Models for implementation — Notes from the Field

• Enthusiasm and energy

• A repair mindset and familiarity with the benefits of repair

Educators + Repair Advocates = Impact