Outreach Events
Upcoming Outreach Events
GRiP constantly strives to connect with the community and share the exciting projects our members are working on. We aim to make these fun, engaging, and inclusive for anyone interested in what we do.
Our Annual Events
Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA)
This event allows us to show off and demo our devices as well as teach others beyond UF how to make them and learn new ways to adapt toys and other items in a professional environment. This is a great networking and learning opportunity for any member.
Adaptathon
This event is a 4-hour event where our goal is to adapt as many toys as possible to send to families of kids with disabilities. This is often a great way for new members to learn new skills and older members to refine their abilities. This is a pivotal event for our Adaptive Gaming Division, though any member may participate.
Hand Camp
This event is put on by an organization called Hands To Love (also stylized as Hands2Love). It is a weekend-long retreat where children and teens with upper limb differences from across the country come together for camp-like experiences. In addition to traditional camp activities, they will also participate in STEM demonstrations and demo devices provided by GRiP. Hand Camp 2022 was a pivotal re-emergence for our members, showing our resilience despite the pandemic. This event is often where GRiP members in the Hands Division will meet up with their recipients to fit them with their tailor-made devices.
GatorLAN
This is an event hosted by Gator Gaming where we get to showcase our adaptive projects, specifically our controller projects. We show off how our designs, of varying complexities, work and let people get a chance to try out our controllers.
We are always looking for more ways to reach the community! If you want to have GRiP attend your event or want us to host a workshop contact our Outreach Coordinator: gripoutreachuf@gmail.com.
External & Inter-organizational Workshops
To join GRiP we do not require any previous knowledge, instead, we host workshops to teach the STEM community and equip future engineers with practical experiences outside of the classroom that they will use in their careers. GRiP in the past has hosted workshops with other student organizations such as SHPE, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, where we gave a summary of GRiP and taught them how to solder and do basic toy adaptations. We commonly host toy adaptation workshops as an introduction to assistive technology. These workshops give an overview of what toy adaptation is and the basic practices used by our adaptation team.
We’ve also hosted workshops on assembling 3D printed prosthetic hands which is a more mechanical introduction to assistive technology for people with limb differences. At GRiP, we’re all about assistive technology. As such, we have hosted several workshops explaining how assistive devices work and why they are important. Moreover, in line with our founding goals, we work to empower people who may not need a device and have learned to live life on their terms.
We are open to hosting different types of workshops so if you are interested in having GRiP host a workshop please contact our Outreach Coordinator: gripoutreachuf@gmail.com.
