[Alex Dinsmoor]

The thing that seems to draw interest to any lunchtime activity at my school is loud music. Anything popular will draw people in like mosquitos to a bug light.

We have also found that having an extremely nice table set up (with tablecloth, trophies, tons of literature, laptops with videos playing) effectively generates interest. This would be your first impression to the students and if they see you as an organized team who looks good and has fun, they are more likely to join.

Lastly, have a game plan for your demonstrations. Going into an event like blind can leave you disorganized and unprofessional. What we do is we have pre-determined activities for the students to partake in (such as a 60 second game driving the robot trying to get as many points as possible) and use these activities to show the public that anyone can be on the team.
For example, we used our 2009 FRC robot to play a game in which a student would try to score as many orbit balls as possible into the trailer in a 60 second period (this activity was at the Boy Scouts of America Robotics Merit Badge preview at Oakland University), and we kept scores of how many the kids did in the time period. We efficiently drew in a large crowd that wanted to watch kids play with and learn about robotics.

Hopefully some of this helped!