On the 24th of September, Team 238 shipped over to Livingston Park to be a part of the 7th annual Mutt Strut, a fundraising event hosted by the Manchester Animal Shelter. After assisting vendors with their set-up, the Crusaders helped operate the photobooth, and put on demonstrations in our own tent. Our team talked to spectators and discussed what FIRST, and our team, is all about. At the end of the day, we were the last to leave after helping as many vendors tear down as possible. It was a long and hot day, but we had a blast spreading the word of FIRST and helping our community.

Mechanical:
The mechanical subteam has been quite busy these past couple months. We have been involved in preparing for a fundraising event to help with travel funding for our upcoming competition season. This is a robotic art project that will involve old materials with a new purpose. We have also been doing a deep cleaning and reorganizing in our shop. We do this so old materials can be stored or thrown out as needed. This process will be important in the upcoming season.   

Electrical:
The electrical subteam has been sorting and organizing our Electrical Cabinet, make a list of all components and where they are located, and making a document that will explain how to wire certain things for people or are new or need a refresher. When these new tasks are done they will help us work more efficiently both knowing where everything is and what the process of wiring components are.

Software:
The software subteam has been deciding on projects to work on during the fall, including creating test standards and rewriting the vision system. We have been working on integrating the code a previous team member wrote into the main project and making it function.

Administration:
The administration subteam worked on the new student handbook. The handbook is a small introduction and summary of what our team does and the requirements you have to meet to participate on our team. We finalized the handbook, and we are ready to implement it into our welcome ritual.

Finance:
The finance subteam has been working to build a new financial budget and ledger. We wanted to make our current document cleaner and easier for anyone on our team to use. We also logged all deposits and payment requests from the past into our new system, which is now being finalized.

Sponsorship & Presentation:
The sponsors and presentations subteam made some minor updates to many different parts of our sponsor packets. We added some new sponsorship tiers to categorize our sponsors and we added some new information that wasn’t included in the previous sponsor packet.

Also planned are some presentations to our amazing sponsors. We do presentations to our sponsors to introduce students from our team to them and keep our sponsors involved in our team all year. The Sponsors and Presentations sub-team currently have two sponsorship presentations on the horizon. The first presentation will be on October 18th for our sponsor Bosch. We will do a robot demonstration and a presentation showcasing our team. The second presentation is for Texas Instruments on October 23rd. We will do a presentation for them presenting our team and the various aspects it takes for our team to run.

Marketing:
The marketing subteam recently had a meeting discussing developments regarding banners and posters, animated logos, and ideas for fundraising within our school. We wish to present ourselves more prominently and professionally, and creating these new branding articles will aid us in continuing to increase awareness of our brand.