Margie Eastman has played a vital role in growing and supporting robotics in Northern Virginia. She has been an active coach, judge, event partner, but most importantly an inspirational mentor to many new coaches and teams.
In addition to coaching a team since 2018, Margie has served as an inspiration and mentor to many other coaches, guiding the creation of more than 16 teams over the past 5 years. Semi-annually she holds an “Introduction to VEX IQ” for elementary and middle school students and parents to encourage participation. She originally held the information sessions in her basement, but interest has grown extensively so she now holds them at her local library to accommodate groups up to 40 students and adults. Margie’s support doesn’t stop at the information sessions. As teams form, Margie is a resource to all new coaches and mentors. She mentors coaches, sharing her lessons learned over the years. She has urged coaches to focus on the engineering design process, building one capability at a time. She has shown over and over that a robot that does some functions really well can win even though it can’t do all functions (e.g. high hang, speed). She mentors coaches to guide their teams to build and drive a consistent robot, not a perfect robot; practice recovery strategies, not a perfect strategy; and continuous communication between drivers and across teams. She stresses the importance in showing students how the engineering design process, communication, and teamwork is applied in their day to day lives in making decisions, communicating opinions, and effective collaboration. She instilled the importance of giving back by encouraging students to share what they have learned and mentor younger IQ teams.
Margie has also spent significant time volunteering as a judge and mentoring new judges. She has served as Judge Advisor for numerous local IQ and V5RC competitions and for VA States MS V5RC State Competition over the past 2-3 years. She has cultivated and trained many of her professional colleagues as new independent judges, garnering an increased interest in volunteering at her company. Since 2021, she has volunteered as a remote judge of engineering notebooks and interviewer for Worlds. This past year, she led the development of the VA States V5RC remote engineering notebook judging process, including training and recruitment of independent judges!
Since 2021, Margie has also actively worked to support and grow VEX in Northern Virginia through her work as an Event Partner. Her philosophy as an event partner is to make sure the tournaments are a memorable and enjoyable experience for both the kids and parents and not just another event. She has cultivated a volunteer base of 250 people to help support her and other event partner’s tournaments.
Through her role as a coach, mentor, judge/judge advisor and Event Partner, Margie has shown true leadership, dedication, and inspiration to the VEX community promoting STEM and passion in students.
