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Originally Posted by 1502
We are wondering if your FRC team gets students from FLL and/or FTC that move up the chain into FRC and if you have any type of system in which students move up the ladder with.
So does this sound like a good plan to other teams? What do you think in general?
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I think you are on the right track!
We noticed that we were losing kids at the middle school level, so we started doing FTC in the middle school in 2008. The transition from FTC to FRC has been much higher. 2 years ago, we started trying to get more involved with our younger students. We now try to mentor all the FLL teams in our district, we invite them to our practice field and we try to get them to our competitions. We donated "BX member for a day" packets to our elementary school's PTA auctions. They had a team shirt, some robot trinkets, and a pass for them to come play robots with us for a day.
We also started coaching JFLL to get kids involved at a younger age and to create positive experiences for our team as well as they little ones. JFLL is a great program for FRC kids to coach (under the direction of an adult as FIRST requires that). So, we have 4 JFLL teams that practice on one night. They split up with different FRC kids and I am there to oversee and help plan. It has really been a neat thing. We started with 2 teams and last year had 4. We sponsor, coach and mentor the teams. We were losing girls in our FLL program so we started with all girl JFLL teams, but we opened it up to everyone this year. It is fun to watch them move from JFLL to FLL!
A positive side note is that this also creates great community support.
This summer we are trying some summer camps for the first time. We'll see how that goes.
But, remember to reach out of the FIRST alumni as well. We still pull in some FIRST rookies at all grades! We had some remarkable seniors join this year for their first year of FIRST ever!
We always try to recruit in our high school as well.