Re: age requirements for FRC?
 

Why? Why not leave it up to each team to decide, just like everything else?

Re: age requirements for FRC?
 

What a wonderful idea! :)

Re: age requirements for FRC?
 

Considering our lead mentor is a technology teacher at one of the districts middle schools, I'd say about 80% or our recruits are from the middle school. In fact, our current Co-Presidents and 3 members of our build team started on the team as 8th graders 5 years ago.

Re: age requirements for FRC?
 

I went through this exercise with our lead mentor/coach this season when a couple of 8th graders wanted to join the team. The consensus we came to was the only minimum age rule was being over 12 to be unsupervised in the pits.

Due to insurance concerns, our 8th graders were not permitted to use power tools. Due to school rules, they couldn't miss class for our regionals, although they were able to join us on Saturday at our non-travel regional. They also weren't eligible for a letter, since they weren't in the high school quite yet.

Re: age requirements for FRC?
 

Bacon is a 4-H team so we don't have to follow any school district rules. Our rule is this:

If you are a sibling of a team member you may be on the team with all rights and privileges provided by the mentors

Our youngest member is in 5th grade. He is on the animation team, in fact all of our animation team is 8th grade and younger. They won the Animation award at Florida this year.

If you are in 8th grade and have had one year of FLL under your belt you can come and join Bacon as a full member. The only thing we ask is that a parent travels with them.

Re: age requirements for FRC?
 

We are opening up to 8th graders as well. If they want to do it, why should we stop them from doing it? :]