October 27, 2025
Co-Written by participating students, Harrison Tinger (’28) and Adam Bererhout (’28)
On August 11, we –Adam Bererhout (‘28) and Harrison Tinger (‘28)– hauled two suitcases filled with 40 lbs of LEGO® off of the baggage carousel in a tiny airport in Dunedin, New Zealand, after 30 hours of travel. This was my third trip in two years going to New Zealand’s South Island to help start robotics teams. I first came to New Zealand with my mother, Mariah Tinger, who is enrolled in a doctoral program at Otago University, which is located in the center of Dunedin. Over these trips, various FTC members and I have been working on a project to mentor and start FIRST® Robotics teams in Dunedin, a region that previously had no FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL) teams.
Before we arrived in New Zealand for the most recent trip, we logged over 200 hours of intense preparation during our summer vacation. On our previous trips, we taught students directly at a few schools, started one FLL team, which won an award at the National FLL competition and was selected to represent New Zealand at an International competition, and built a lot of personal relationships with schools and institutions. The goal of this third trip was not only to mentor teams, but to start and support a community of FLL coaches in Dunedin. Over the months of June and July, we prepared by building on the work of our previous two trips. We needed to create a coaches workshop that would serve as a way to gather adults into the same room so we could “teach the teachers”. For this, we needed a curriculum, a space to teach, a way to gather interest, materials to teach with, and incentive for the schools to start a team, among other things.
For the curriculum, we knew we needed an excellent one-day workshop. Adam and I spent many days in July in the Waring Polygon space with Francis Schaeffer (Waring Robotics head coach) and Caleb Sylvester (‘28), taking the curriculum from Sarah Carlson-Lier’s FLL robotics class and Francis’ advanced summer camp, and turning it into a workshop to teach coaches how to design, build, and code, as well as give them the background knowledge to start a team. By the time we left for Dunedin, we had a full set of slideshows and lecture notes for a six-hour FLL coaches’ workshop.
As we were developing the curriculum, we realized that we needed lots of different materials, such as computers, a mission board, attachments, robots, and example mechanisms. Some of this could be readied before the trip and some items needed to be there when we arrived. We worked with Waring IT to make sure the computers would run smoothly in New Zealand. We built five robots, made many different mechanisms to demonstrate different parts of our curriculum, and designed base plates to build attachments on.
We also knew we needed a space to run this workshop. We built off of the relationship we developed with the Tūhura Otago Museum (Otago Museum) during our earlier two trips. My mother was instrumental in this aspect, as she coordinated details with the Otago Museum, one of New Zealand’s largest museums. Because of the success of our previous work with the museum, they offered us a lecture hall free of charge (the Hutton Theater) to run our workshop, as well as a display table in the foyer of the museum to run robot demonstrations and attract attention for our workshop. They offered these rooms on Saturday and Sunday, when there was the highest volume of visitor traffic.
A key factor in the success of this trip was the relationship we had already built with Deb Woolliams, Head of FIRST® New Zealand. When we told her about our plans, she offered to donate FLL kits that we could use for teaching, FLL kits for each team we started, waive registration fees for each team we started, and organize a Dunedin FLL championship if we could start eight teams. Our third trip would not have succeeded without the direct support of FIRST® New Zealand. We also needed to generate interest for our workshop and demonstration. We would not be able to reach our goal of eight teams if no one came to our workshop. We created two different flyers: one for the schools telling them about the coaches workshop and how to start a team, and one for the general public to attract people to the demonstration and capture interest. If we could get people to the demonstration, then maybe we could talk them into coming to the coaches’ workshop.
Another important part of the success of our trip was the work done by my mom and other adults in the Waring community who needed to arrange housing, car rentals, airline tickets, and legal releases to make this trip possible. Adam and I were less involved in this, but we knew it took a lot of work. Fundraising was another important aspect of this trip. This was all going to cost a lot of money, so we spent a large portion of our summer emailing and reaching out to companies and individuals in the area. We contacted around 40 companies asking for sponsorship and sent follow-up emails as well. We want to thank the generous support of some anonymous donors who funded the majority of the trip.
We also contacted about 25 schools through email, taking the suggestions from friends we had made through our previous trips. We wrote multiple blurbs for the Otago Museum, which they posted to help promote our events. We created a map to plan out which schools we would visit each day, grouping these visits by location.
So, having done months of preparation, we stumbled out into the freezing Dunedin winter, jetlagged and shell-shocked from the contrast of the New England summer. We knew we had three weeks, with the middle two weekends being our only chance to teach coaches in depth, in hopes of these coaches starting teams. The first week we moved into our nearly cost-free but freezing house and got right to work. We visited schools, we emailed the teams about the workshop and told them that we had arrived, we modified our teaching materials to work with the newly released board, and added specific segments to our curriculum about the new board. Thanks to Deb Wooliams, the new mission boards arrived shortly after we did, which was excellent as we needed them immediately for our coaching seminar. We did most of this while huddled around a space heater on our floor.
On our first weekend, we arrived at the Otago Museum, set up the demonstration table in the foyer, and also set up the workshop in the Hutton Theater. We waited until 10:15 a.m., 30 minutes past the designated start time of the workshop, and realized that no one was coming. Instead of giving up, however, we pivoted to running the demonstration in the foyer for longer. Thanks to the Otago Museum’s flexibility, we were able to run the demonstration for the full day. The same thing happened the next day, so we ran the demonstrations a second time. These demonstrations were a huge success, and we talked to over 150 people. However, the reality was that no one had signed up, we hadn’t started any teams, and we were a week into our trip. Therefore, we knew the second week would be critical to our trip. We walked, bussed, and drove all over Dunedin to visit eight schools, as well as revisiting the schools we had already contacted. We made sure that everyone would come to the workshop who said that they were interested, and we sent out reminders as the date grew closer. We put up more flyers around the area, and we pleaded with schools to come to the workshop. My mom was a huge help and drove us to the most distant schools. As the weekend drew near, we hoped people would show up.
On Saturday, we set up our demonstration in the foyer and prepared our workshop and curriculum. Again, no one showed up, and again we spent our entire day running the demonstration as a last effort to try and attract people to our final workshop. This was a huge disappointment, as we had worked so hard for the past week only to face another setback, but we still had one last chance. We went home having spoken to hundreds more people at the foyer demonstration, hoping that tomorrow we would have a group of prospective coaches attend our coaches workshop. Sunday morning we got up, genuinely praying that at least someone would come. We got there, set up our workshop in the Hutton Room, and 14 people showed up! We presented the curriculum that we had put so much preparation into and started teaching. We taught them about the robot, key design aspects, and how to write the most reliable code. We taught them how to register a team through us, receiving a free mission model kit and having the registration fee waived. They dove in, worked hard trying to understand everything we told them, and by the end of the day, five of the teachers told us that they would like to start a team. We were overjoyed, we went out for a celebratory dinner, and my mom told us she was very proud of us.
The next day, we got up excited but knew that we were not done. We still had to find three more teams in order to run the regional competition, and we had only five days left. With my mom’s help, we planned out what we would do to secure the three more teams. In this third week, former Waring student William Li came and helped take pictures, talk to schools, and keep track of the schools we had contacted. It was great having him for the last week of the trip, and we are very thankful for the work he did. We decided we would go out and try to teach the workshop in a shorter period of time at individual schools. We created a new slideshow that summarized the most interesting and crucial parts of our curriculum, and we coordinated with different schools to arrange meetings to teach the coaches and students. We ran this mini class at five different schools, and from this we were able to start an additional four teams, overshooting our goal of starting eight teams in the Dunedin area. This was incredible news for us, and we were amazed at what we had pulled off. We then met with a teacher from one of the schools and convinced him to host the Dunedin regional competition. We put him in contact with Deb, and they sorted out the details. We also had to coordinate a place to deliver the mission model sets that we had been teaching with, as we could not take them back to the United States. Luckily, two schools reached out, happy to take the prebuilt mission models and get the season started right away. After an intense three weeks of work, we spent an exhausting 30 hours of travel time to get back to the US. We were thrilled but incredibly jet lagged, and it was amazing to reunite with the Waring community on camping trip, finally free from the intense responsibilities of the journey.
We want to thank FIRST® New Zealand, in particular Deb Woolliams, for supporting us and making our efforts possible. We want to thank the Tūhura Otago Museum, specifically Malin Toa, for being so flexible and generously donating a space for both our workshop and our demonstration. We want to thank Will Potter and Tim Bakland for taking time out of their summer vacations to have meetings and help arrange this trip. We want to thank Caleb Sylvester (‘28) for helping plan this trip and doing much of the preparation work without being able to go on the actual trip. We want to thank Aren Bloom (‘28) for monitoring our Lupine email inbox and helping us stay on top of responses to parents and schools. We want to thank my mom for helping to create this opportunity for me and my team, and doing most of the planning of car rentals, housing, plane tickets, and other behind-the-scenes work. We want to thank Adam’s mom for letting us dream this up, helping book plane tickets, and letting Adam take most of the summer to plan this trip and go on it. We want to thank Francis Schaeffer for supporting our ambitious idea and making it become a reality, as well as helping us write our curriculum and plan our trip. We want to thank Sarah Carlson-Lier for allowing us to use parts of her curriculum and allowing us to take materials to New Zealand to use in our teaching. We want to thank the anonymous donors who believed in our project. Finally, we want to thank the schools that we visited who started teams. We hope your journey with FIRST® robotics is as rewarding as ours has been.
