because we're the 'Feds' we were thinking about handing out cheep plastic handcuffs. However, we couldn't this past year due to lack of funding. But when we finally have money to spend on handcuffs i think that they will be very cool.

For the record, I got sick on those gummy sharks... couldn't stand another gummy for a week :)

Those 225 keychains were incredibly cool. My mom still keeps one or two on her enormous keychain she started in 1980...

My all-time favorite hand-out, however, was the pre-greased shop rags in 2001. I remember a guy just sitting on this huge orange-looking clear bag, when I walked up to trade. He got up, dug out a rag, and handed it to me, with the team number written out and grease on one side :) That was definitely one of the funniest handouts I've seen.

This year 422 handed out "I drive my other car with JOYSTICKS" as a bumper sticker, but they were too small and tended to become one with a car's paint (read: personal experience). A very zen sticker if I say so myself.

team candy can melt. team button its light inexpensive each year and you they become collectors items.

Kodak Picture Maker
 

This year at the Johnson & Johnson Mid-Atlantic Regional, a team brought one of Kodak's picture maker kiosks that they let everyone use for free. Very cool to be able to have instant hard-copies of your digital photos.

DVD's
 

I think it would be really really cool to get DVD's. My first year with robotics was 2002, so i only heard about the cool stuff that people had previously handed out, not to mention the awesome stuff i got this year. Phone cards and stuff are really good ideas, but I would really like to see someone do a DVD that has a demo of their robot set to music and/or a section that has profiles about all the team members with short scenes of them working on something. I know it is expensive to do that kind of stuff, but that doesn't mean you have to hand them out, you could have contests to win them. I would be the first one in line if i could win a DVD! Just an idea. :D

Video 'business cards'
 

Some teams and companies already do this, but they make a digital video similar to what you are describing, put them on little CD's, and hand them out to people. That may be cheaper than DVD's and you get the same results. Also, can't assume that everybody has a DVD player, computers are still more accessable.

P.S. I still like candy the best, it's the least time and space consuming, and you get to say 'Yum.'

First off, hats off to DanLevin53 for recessatating this thread that was in remission for 5 months.

Also, I have seen a few CD's that were handed out, and many were quite amuzing.

Our team made a cool little interactive CD. I don't know if you have seen them but we burned them onto those 100MB MiniCDs. It was mainly for judges, but I think a few got passed around to other teams.

On our CD we had a Flash animation which had info on our team and a copy of the animation.

I would reccommend Flash MX for ppl interested in making a CD...its an incredibly fun (for me, at least) program to learn and you can do many cool things with it. It isn't hard to create a menu and some buttons with text, and cool stuff like rollovers for buttons is built in.

Are those like the 3 inch ones that fit in the little "tray within a tray" in your CD-ROM drive?

yeah, those're the ones

they're pretty cool, i don't remember if they were cheaper or more expensive than regular ones, though. They function and burn exactly the same, just with 100MB capacity.

Yeah, I got one as a GCN prevew. We were going to do something like that, but it never happened. Hopefully we will get to it this year.

I was thinking about that my team should get the small CD's and use those for give out (along with buttons :)), but that idea never caught on when ever I told anyone about it. Maybe I can convince more people on the team to make them this year.

we actually made team promo CD's on the cool little ones...but we gave them to companies. i never thought of handing them out to other teams, but that would be cool. our team was actually fortunate enough to get all the lil CD's made for free by this company.

ooh thats lucky...we were up all night burning CDs hours before Florida. We also didn't get to make labels for em, at Florida we had to recruit all of the girls on the team to write the title on them because none of us had good enough handwriting. However we didn't know that almost none of the girls knew how to spell.....

been there...girls writing cyberblue 234 all day on frisbee's...what fun!