Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

Almost noone at school has even heard of us. we have a single bullatin board with a few pictures and our number, but it is surrounded by dozens of other boards advertising the other clubs and organizations at the school. The only reason anyone has even heard of us is that we have a robot we built during the off season which shoots t-shirts. T-shirt bot, as it's cleverly been named, is guarenteed to break one way or another everytime it is in front of an audiance of more than fifty for mor than five seconds. It also has a tendancy to be unable to hit the bleachers; it will either clear them entirely, or land at the feat of the people in the front row. We are the laughing stock for those who know us.

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

Well now I feel spoiled reading some. Im a freshman on the 3620 team We get to use the woodshop classroom, the actual woodshop room with tables and as many power tools as any person on the build team would want...:D we also have two "labs." One is small and basically belongs to the programmers (Their den) and another used for CAD by us. Plus we have a "robotics lab" which was the metal shop room at one point.

To actually answer the question, the first two years (this is all from what I've heard and I know) were pretty rough on getting people to join. After we went to state last year so many people wanted to be a part. Im one of the 20 who are coming daily to work and personally I think most of the team doesn't appreciate everyone as a whole as others do... People at school basically responds with "oh, yea, that's cool or whatever..." They do know we are there, they just end up slightly acknowledging our presence. We present to the school board and the teachers are very nice. We are just one big group of (Mainly) happy socially awkward friends.

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

Less then zero. We're lucky to get about 5 new kids out of about 1500 students interested each year.

It's a very sports centered school. Their last principal was an cheerleader there when she was a student and was only worried about cheer and the football teams and the current one cares more about the FIRST teams from his past high schools then us :mad:

The district looks at us like a piece of dog poo they just scraped off their shoe too. Our sponsor has been fighting forever to get a robotics class started so students can get credit and more time to build.

We get passed over for getting our own room to work out of every year too, we thought last year was gonna be our year but instead the perfect room went to the ROTC program and they took all the work counters and storage out. :mad: :mad: :mad:

No appreciation for STEM what so ever.

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

Our team has been around for seven years. I am a senior, and when I joined, I know that I had never actually heard of robotics in the general school setting. I heard about it from a friend on the team, not through a display or ad. We have grown our membership and gradually increased our presence. We have two display cases with signs and trophies, a robot using IFI controls that we built last summer to launch t-shirts at football (people love these things, every team should have one if possible), and I occasionally take the robot for a spin in the lunch room, and shoot basketballs at varsity basketball games.

Our school likes us. We have a wonderful teacher who is highly supportive, access to the metals and woods shop (to use metals shop you must actually take metals), and we were granted access to an unused room for build. Want to make sure your principal knows you exists? Every time you get a chance, walk up to them, shake their hand (firmly), look them in the eye, and ask them when they will come to visit the robotics team. It works. Not many kids will do that.

If you're a team trying to gain access to events such as football and basketball, it helps to know the athletic director personally. Ours knows me by name, and loves when robots come to games. It helps tremendously.

When I joined, it felt like nobody knew that our team existed. If I brought up robotics, people often asked "Don't you make robots fight?". This drove me nuts. But it was due to a lack of knowledge. In four years our team has become cool. Kids ask when we will bring the t-shirt bot to games, what the challenge is, etc. The key is to make yourself known. Get out there and show people robotics is cool. The other day I took a bimba cylinder to physics with me, just for fun, and my teacher asked what it was. I got to tell my physics class how our robot has to climb a pyramid AND play ultimate frolf. People thought it was awesome.

Make a name for yourselves, show everyone that you are cool:cool: . And have patience. Recognition comes with hard work.

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

This is an old thread, but the topic it addresses is ongoing. It seems like most people are using it to finally vent their frustration at the lack of recognition at their school. As someone who saw their team go from the meets-in-a-closet power-tools-are-too-expensive I-didn't-even-know-we-had-a-team-is-it-like-BattleBots stage to school wide recognition, I completely understand that and I have some advice for you. Obviously the barriers to respect for the Robotics program will be different for each school, but this is what worked for us.

• Publicize the team. The rest is a lot easier if you have a reputation for at least existing, even if people don't know what you do. We organized lunchtime events after the season ended where any student could play a vastly simplified version of the game (for LogoMotion, it was just "hang tubes on pegs") and we kept a scoreboard. The next year, a few of the highest scorers joined the team and are now some of our most valued members. Do whatever you can to show people, "this is what we made and this is what it can do".
• Promote yourself to incoming students. I can't stress this enough. The earlier you can get prospective students interested, the more likely they will be to stay that way. Club fairs at the beginning of the year usually happen after freshmen have started to find their niche, but if you can get them before school starts they some of then will make their niche with you. Our big success was at the open house. We got ourselves put on the official tour, set up some FRC and FTC bots for display, and then made simple basebots from the TETRIX kit that could play a simplified FTC. We let the prospective freshmen control them and a lot of them loved it. I'm pretty sure a few of our current members picked our school based on that.
• Be persistent with faculty. The way we moved from a tiny closet in a mostly disused wing of the administration building to our current two former offices next to a convenient courtyard was by writing to the administration every year listing the reasons we wanted a new room, what our requirements were, and when we knew what rooms we had a chance at getting, a suggestion. We didn't end up with the room we wanted, but it's definitely a step up. In this situation, the mentioning the previous two points in a way that suggests robotics improves the school is a helpful tactic.
• Take every opportunity. If you're on the lookout for ways to improve your recognition, you'll start to see them everywhere. Special event? Hold a fundraiser or exhibition. Contact on the school paper? Give them an article proposal. Friendly teacher? Ask them to announce your next event. Related topic comes up in class? Use it to talk about robotics. No matter how little support you may have from the administration, there's always something you can do.
• Do well in the competition. There's a reason this is last, even though it's the main purpose of your team (another note: team, not club, makes you sound much more organized). Doing well isn't necessarily going to help your team if there's nobody outside the team who cares. As strange as it is to argue against putting all your energy into building a great robot, remember to dedicate effort to advancing your team.

The thing I'm most proud of about my time in robotics is the work we did in getting it recognized. If anyone has any specific questions about how to help their team with the same issue I'd be happy to help.

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

Our sons team is in its first year. But the prior year they won Pioneers of Engineering at UC Berkeley the first year they participated. So roll around this year they have a teacher that signs off on it and sponsors but does nothing at all. They have a closet that they were recently kicked out of since night classes are going to be in the classroom after school. They couldn't get any donors. But FIRST came through and paid the very expensive entrance fee. They actually canvased the neighborhood going to local businesses. So right now they're doing a robot with no mentor, no teacher, no adult supervision.

They did have publicity they were in the city newspaper for the win they got with another local school. But beyond the PTA giving them $500 bucks I've seen like nada from the school. Oh one teacher showed up to help pickup the kit and bring it to school. My son handled all the paperwork and I drove them to the kickoff and the workshop. But that was onle 7 of the 25ish kids in the whole group. We're a very urban school in a city that cares little about football. But the principle currently was a athletics director and the football team seems to get a lot.

Yeah sorry its very frustrating.

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

I would say that 60% of the students here know that we exist and of that 60%, around 10% are genuinely interested. But most of the girls aren't actually interested enough to join the team, saying "Robotics? Oh God, I'm not smart enough for that."

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

The team used to the best kept secret of the school. I discovered it by accident, as did most of the current senior members. Recently, we have done a lot of work to change that and have become a lot more involved with the school. I would guess that about 80% of underclassmen know that we exist and about 20% are interested. About 10% of the total population is interested enough to give it a shot, BUUUUT...

Our problem is that we compete directly with the Speech and Debate team. Gonzo (the teacher) runs a successful program (they have gone to the equivelant of nationals every year) and its a lot of fun. This is great, the downside for us is that we pull from the same "talent pool". What makes them retain more students is that it is less intimidating. It's the "I'm not smart enough to do that" thought that Unicorns mentioned above.

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

1657- we have a main "hangar" with a corner for cad and programming teams, we have a second room (used to be for cad, animation and FLL but I don't know if it is still in use), we also have access to the school's wood workshop and computer rooms.
we have an underpaid and extremely insane mentor (in a good way) who also teaches classes at school. since I graduated (2008) me and my fellow alumni have been coming back to aid the team, not an easy feat due to three years of mandatory army service.
the program also counts as "5 pts robotics" in our bagrut system as much as you can get for physics or biology.

Our main problem is that the team is slowly being sidelined and forgotten. every year less kids join, used to be we only took 11-12th graders since the program is very intense but now even with 10th graders the 2013 team is still smaller than the one from 2008.
Most of the school's teachers either ignore the program or advise kids not to join due to intensity. but there is one math teacher that hates it and is willing to rant on about falling grades at the slightest chance.
we do show of the robots a bunch of times each year and the main work hangar is always open to visitors.
the school's volleyball team is given much more respect despite the fact that the FRC team has a better record.

edit *I forgot to mention that each year we get a couple of girls in the team, last year I think the coach was a girl...*

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

My school has a decent amount of members we had 67 which was later reduced to 40 something it's still a good amount. Another thing that make our team stand out are the Mohawks we have especially since they are red and people ask what it's for.

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

Ah, I'm so glad someone gave me a chance to rant about this!

One of my (least) favorite quotes about our team came from a fellow student a couple of years ago: "We have a robotics team?". We're getting more awareness, but it's slow going. Homecoming weeks tend to be rough for me, just seeing how much people are willing to go all out for football or basketball, and yet we go ignored. We're currently making duel use in our physics classroom, that's where we build. We were going to get a little nook in a new bus barn our school built, but now everyone's just using it for storage. I love looking at the financial stats: in four years, we've gotten about $2,500 from our school. That's about one-half the $5,000 we got from JCPenney and an even smaller fraction of the $15,000+ we got from NASA. Meanwhile, we're currently installing brand new lights (poles and everything) to replace the completely functional ones previously lighting the football and baseball field. Our team just about didn't happen this year because we didn't know where we were going to get the entry fee. Now, I know we need to take responsibility for getting recognition, at least to an extent, but it's still frustrating when the basketball team gets a full gym complete with programs when we're fighting for their scraps.

Oh, that felt good to get off my chest. Thank you!

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

I have to rant on this one. Our team has had a terrifying lack of enthusiasm and dedication. Our team consisted of 40 members. We run a FLL tournament in our state. It's mandatory for the whole team. 20 said they had other things to do. But, out of the 20 that should have come....only 10 did. Our mentor was mad. So, after only 6 years of action, this year, Ultimate Ascent, will be the final year of FRC team 2348, the Cool Geeks. It was a great time having a team here, and I hope we can find a new faculty advisor.


But, the good thing is that every year at our school's first assembly, we had our club mentioned in a skit, talking about the many activities. This time, we even had our team have a t-shirt cannon. That really got interest sparked :3

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

I have the choice of participating in two different robotics teams because i go to the high school and a career/technical school. At the high school the robotics team is ridiculed but at the career school it is thought of pretty highly. I am on the robotics team at the carer school, Team 3885 The Shockers. I would have to say the difference is how the administration promotes the teams to the school. I'm not even for sure if the principal at the high school knows the robotics team exist. At the career school though the robotics team gets recognition from all the teachers and administration. The career school also has many classes that benefit us in fabricating the robot. We have a machining shop, welding shop, electrical shop, robotics shop, graphic arts shop, automotive shop, motorcycle shop, media design shop, and nursing shop. Believe it or not but all these shops help us build the robot. If not directly it is their unique experiences that can give us an "out of the box" approach to things. So i would say that school support depends on the type of students you have, how your members represent your team, and how the administration promotes your team. Remember that if your own members are embarrassed of the team, how can you expect the general student body to show pride? BE PROUD!!!! :D :cool:

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

I'm quite happy to say that a good portion of our school knows who we are and what we do, though perhaps not in deep detail. We'll have random people walk in and want to see what we're doing sometimes, that want to come upstairs and check out our shop area (but they have to wear safety glasses if we're working, which surprisingly, many of them think are actually really neat)

We have our T-Shirt shooter, which we bring out and use at all the football games, and indoors for some of our rallies. In our most recent rally, I was fortunate enough to be invited to come out and speak about our program for a while (The reaction was great when I talked about this year's game.) Many people came to us afterwards saying things like "Woah! That's so cool!"

Most of our incoming freshmen are aware of our presence as well. We secure booths at all the open houses and tour nights, bringing out an old FRC bot and a few FTC bots to put on display.

What we like to emphasize, and what we find gets recognized more, is to emphasize an open-door policy if you can. We try to make it as clear as possible that we're open to the entire student body, regardless of skill or what they know. There's something for anyone on a FIRST team, but you just need to make it look as welcoming and non-intimidating as possible. In my few short years of FIRST, I've found that so many people outside will say, 'I wish I was smart enough to do this". It's that 'robotics is only for the super smart kids' mentality that we are trying to break.

For teams who are at schools where you're barely noticed, it's important to go out and get yourself seen. Be active. Make a table at lunch, put something on display. Ask to speak at pep rallies. Build a robot for show, a T-Shirt shooter is a great project for the off-season (really nice for training new members and getting them used to working with robots), and is what most of our school has seen us by, leading them to check out the other stuff we do. Shoot shirts out at some school events, and the crowds go NUTS (Just be careful if you ever fill them with candies like we did :p That Halloween day was fun :D )

It takes some work and waiting on the team's part, but recognition comes. Perhaps the easiest ting you can do, is simply talk about robotics with friends and classmates. Ask your teachers if you could say a few words in class. Take the initiative to get the team publicized, and you will.

Re: How much does your school's general population care about your team?
 

Very little, if at all. For one, our team has been working out of and storing our materials in an abandoned stairwell/closet for its entire history (which we're actually getting kicked out of soon, and they haven't told us where they're moving us, if anywhere).

Our school administration hasn't shown a bit of positive acknowledgement towards us, it's almost as if we're a burden to them. As for the student body, we have a small local circle of friends and parents that congratulate us when we do good, but aside from that it's not much else. Regardless however, we have a good time at robotics with each other anyway. We actually removed our school logo from our team shirts this year.