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Originally Posted by ZipTie3182
Sorry if this seems really ignorant, but I thought to compete in FRC you had to be in grades 9-12? I must be wrong if some towns have middle school teams. This would actually be great for my team if we could allow in 7th and 8th graders. We have a really hard team recruiting since we're not through a school. Could someone verify this?
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Confirming what EricH said above, officially the only mention of age for FRC is pre-college. I had to look before the 2011 season when I made the mistake of giving middle school students (7th graders mostly) the option of competing in FRC or VEX and they chose FRC. There was no problems with it officially but I was very nervous of having incredibly young children around power tools. We had to have some very specific rules regarding use of the larger machines (students under a certain age were not allowed to use the mill or the lathe). The biggest problem we ran into was that many of the students were so small that they couldn't actually use the tools. Crimping wires was a pretty funny sight to be honest.
That being said, I think these students got it in a way I'd never seen before. They added a lot of value to the team and I'm glad we gave them the chance. Probably wouldn't do it again though, simply put, I think that most of these students would have been better served by competing in FTC or VEX as it would have given them more chances to iterate which is important at that age.