S.P.A.M. (Speed, Power, and Maneuverability) is a team of high school students from Martin County, Florida. Founded in 1997, we have a longstanding culture of safety, success, and Gracious Professionalism. Over the years we have been expanding our outreach programs to sustain our team and impact our community.

We work extensively with various FIRST programs including FLL. Four years ago we partnered with the local Education Foundation to start and fund FLL teams in all of the elementary and middle schools in our county. In addition to schools, we have also started teams through the Boys and Girls Club, 4H, and Homeschool support groups. Our county now averages about 22-26 FLL teams each year, several of which we coach or mentor. For over 10 years we have been running and hosting FIRST LEGO League tournaments and now run simultaneous qualifying tournaments to accommodate the growing number of teams in our county. Our goal is to expand and support FLL so that every student in our community has an opportunity to be involved.

Other FIRST programs we are expanding include FRC and Jr.FLL. We started FRC team 6225 and have been mentoring them for 3 years. We are currently working with them to start their own progression of programs with FLL and Jr.FLL. We also have recently become heavily involved with Jr.FLL. In this last year, we have started 23 Jr.FLL teams and coached and mentored a majority of those teams. We also ran several Expos so those teams could have the full FIRST experience.

One program we have been developing for several years is our LEGO Camps. We run them every year and use them as both a fundraiser and an outreach program. Our LEGO Camps have been so successful that we decided to share it with other teams. We created the how-to-kit called Camp-In-A-Box (CIAB) which contains the lesson plans, instructions, and paperwork for any team to run a camp and adapt it to their needs (CIAB can be found on our website). We also pilot tested the kit in Columbia, India, and the Philippines.

Our other outreach efforts include our community demonstrations. We believe demos are a great way to network and gain recognition. We average about 50 community events every year. In an effort to standardize our message we created a demo sub-team. Members of the team are trained and practiced in representing our team, so we can keep out image constant.

Our goal for the future is to expand and sustain our outreach programs beyond our immediate community.