When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

Our high school is an eastern high school, so the schoolyear starts on the first week of September. But our team doesn't actually start meeting until at least a month after that.

How is it for your team? What month do you start school, and do you start meeting as soon as school starts? If not, when does your team start meeting?

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

Our meetings officially start only a week or two after school starts... which means, pretty soon! I guess it's time for us to figure out what we'll be doing this fall...

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

School starts the 5th. We have some mentor-officer only meetings about 3 weeks in, after 2 or 3 weeks of those we start having full team meetings again. (This will be my first year year from the beginning of the year, this is how it was explained to me.)

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

We have Leadership meetings and all team meetings periodically throughout the summer. When school starts, this week, we will typically have an all team meeting for returning students to discuss recruiting, which occurs during September. We have already scheduled 3 days a week through November starting the first week of October for Fall training.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

Our team has been meeting off and on all summer. We will begin having regular meetings again as soon as school starts. Hosting an offseason in October means we have to hit the ground running as soon as school starts the first week of September to make sure everyone is back and on the same page.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

We're goofy. We just started a "balanced calendar" schedule - our first day of school was July 31st. (we get 2 weeks off for fall and spring breaks; our school year ends on May 31.)

We just had our callout this past Wednesday. We'll meet Wednesday evenings during the offseason, when school is in session.
Our first project is building a float for the homecoming parade, on September 14th.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

We don't have a start date - our team meets every Wednesday throughout the year, including summer. The only Wendesdays we don't meet are the two over Christmas, the one over Thanksgiving, and the first Wednesday after our last competition of the year (usually).

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

Ours started in the summer of 2008 when we implemented a year round program.
With VEX and FIRST, there really is no "start" and "end" date.:)

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

The school year here start on the 27th of this month, that week the veteran team meets without the mentors present, then either the second or third week will have our meeting with the veteran team, mentors and new members and discuss what the team plans to do to prepare the new kids for the chaotic and fun 2013 FRC season,

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

Team 1208 has started this week, our second week of school.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

The core group of members who have a real passion for robotics meet year round. The business-centric members only meet a couple times over the summer to review and revise the business plan, bylaws, and update other items. The team-at-large attends multiple demos over the off-season months.

The actual "go complete" team meetings start at our Christmas party where we elect our team leaders for the year.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

As soon as possible, after school starts. We have a veteran-member only meeting first to bring them up to speed, and then an open meeting the next week.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

It depends on how you define "meeting".

But 1405 has been meeting all summer long (I jumped in sometime during mid/late July). But from what I understand, the meetings have been going on since a few weeks after Finger Lakes.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

We start our pre season meeting in late October one week before the Rah Cha Cha Ruckus to get the new students acclimated to the robots program and get the returning students back online with the team.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

We meet at least weekly year-round.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

We had our introduction/new member meeting yesterday the second week of school. But we have been meeting 4-5 days a week since Nov 2011.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

err...T plus three years? We've been year-round since about 2009 (rarely breaking completely for even a few weeks).

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

The meetings stopped?!

We kept staging meetings about once a week all summer long to work on things. Actually gained a member that way (win!), but most of our newbies will enter in the next few weeks.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

Same here! Looks like we'll being doing FLL again this year, and also participating in the VEX competition.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

Our team has a pretty good set up for starting up the program and bringing it in sync with school, and it usually happens in the first 1-3 weeks of school starting.

The goal in the first 1-3 weeks is to get the rookies in. There are been emails flying around about plans for the fall VEX event and off-season FRC events, but until the rookies get in, there's not too much to do.

The first meeting is the veterans meeting (1-2 weeks). Returning veterans are asked to come to a meeting where the goal is simply to work off the summer social rust, let the summer high-fives settle, and get people on the same page as far as the rookie presentation and general season guidelines.

The second meeting is the rookie meeting (held one week after veterans meeting). New members and a select number of veterans are asked to put on a show for the new members, at which point new members are fed with information.

After the rookie meeting, the team settles into a routine. The VEX teams are formed and everyone focuses on that until competition.

- Sunny G.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

August, 2003

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

Our school starts the day after the US holiday of Labor Day, and the frequency of our team meetings changes throughout the year. Officially, our team functions year-round (with miscellaneous community service projects, fundraising opportunities, etc.) During the summer meetings are spread out, perhaps once a month (with optional meetings for our pit crew before and after demos to do a little troubleshooting and adjusting). September consists of full team meetings every other week. October usually has weekly meetings. November and December are the months when our meeting count picks up- with semi-weekly meetings. January and february after the FRC kick-off: if you are on our build team, you will be working 5-6 days a week, sometimes 7. After the ship date, we have 3 meetings a week until worlds. After worlds, we go back to our summer schedule.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

Team 1058 meets weekly throughout the summer and twice a week starting in October. That is also the same time we invite freshman to join our team, so I guess it is a really the "start" of our year

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

Our team meets at least weekly all year round. We don't really have an off-season, it's just busy all year round!

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

We've begun meeting for the 2012/2013 season and we're very excited about it. We're challenging ourselves and I'm really looking forward to seeing how it all rolls out through the semesters.

All the best, teams!

Jane

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

We are starting Wednesday. We did some demos and taught a bunch of Lego and Vex classes over the summer, but I couldn't honestly classify those as meetings since a huge portion of the team was out of town or otherwise occupied.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

We started last Tuesday, with our first official club meeting. We did meet once a month during the Summer to keep in touch with our veterans (only 4 left). Should be meeting every Tuesday until kick off, including how many ever Saturdays we need to finish our projects.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

We started school on August 20th but our team doesn't start meeting until September. We have team leader interviews starting September 11th, then the team leaders will meet once a week starting September 18th. Our first full team meeting is on September 24th. A few of us students met over the summer for demos and summer classes but technically we start meeting in September. After our kickoff meeting, we meet as a team once or twice a month until kickoff and our team leaders meet once a week until kickoff.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

Well this year our team, which serves as a class at our school, meets during sixth period Tuesdays to Thursdays, except for FRC Build. Our year starts on the first Tuesday of the school year, which for us was August 28.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

We're opening our doors (Open Enrollment meeting) for the 2013 competition season in 1:45!

This year, we officially start meeting next week. Last year, we didn't meet until October. This is a huge advantage, as we can now recruit more students AND have a longer research and development period.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

Today was the 3rd day of classes at our school.

We kept going through July last year on account of going to IRI for the first time. In prior years we stopped for the summer and got going in mid-late September.

I think that's in the past now.

We've got after-school recruitment meetings this week and next week with our first returning members meeting meeting next Thursday (Sept 6), the the first all-team meeting the following Tuesday (Sept 11).

We have an in-school demo on the 21st, a demo at a local engineering company on the 25th and then an off season event on the 29th and then a booth at the community fair Oct 6th.

Success! Be careful what you wish for!

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

School for us started August 27 and we are going to meet every Thursday except for the first week.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

We had summer meetings every Monday and so we skipped a week so we could focus on school starting, then started up every Monday and Tuesday, and Thursday to help with the FLL Team we Mentor.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

After champs we met every thursday after school for a couple hours. During the summer we met every Thursday from 1-4pm (sometimes later). Other sub-groups like CAD would meet in addition to the Thursday meetings. Now that school has started back up, we have a leadership meeting Tuesdays after school, lunch meetings on Thursday to discuss what will be going on after school that day where we will meet from 3-5pm. Again, other teams like PR/CAD/Fundraising will meet in addition to these meeting times.

We topped off at 85 kids this summer, yikes. We are down to about 60 now.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

This is the first year that we've gone full year, so our meetings started in July with some pre-season stuff. Now that school's started (Just started last week), we've done Freshmen Activities Day and we're hosting a welcome mixer for new students on the 18th. We'll have 4 meetings a month (2 Tuesdays, 2 Saturdays) until the end of November, then probably meet a couple of times a week through December, readying for the build season. Then during build season, we meet Tuesday & Thursday nights and all day Saturdays.

And through all that, we're doing a demo at Raytheon (one of our major sponsors), most likely teaming up with our school at the 3 fall fairs in the area, and we did the Labor Day parade last week.

We're off and running with a bang!

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

624 CRyptonite had there first meeting yesterday, a week and a half into the school year. My son said it was short, but was basically to see how many new members they would have.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

We're a fairly young team still (2013 will be our third year) and don't have enough money or space to do constant projects or meetings, but our introduction meeting was on August 30th and our first business meeting the 13th. From here on out we *should* be meeting twice a month with hopefully some form of build on one Saturday a month, and we have a few demos lined up as well.

Re: When Do Meetings Start for Your Team?
 

Wayne-Westland Schools start the first Tuesday after Labor Day. The first meeting for returning members was that Wednesday and the first meeting for new members was the following week.

Mondays are the Executive Board Meetings, 1 Tuesday/two months is a parent/mentor meeting, Wednesdays are our 1st high school's meeting day (Wayne), and Thursdays are our 2nd high school's meeting day (Westland).

During Build season, Mon/Wed/Thurs/Fri are all meeting days.