Y'all have some serious work cut out for you guys. At major risk of self promotion.......
Here is what we did here in Georgia the past year or so. At the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year Georgia had 18 FRC rookie teams on the taxiway getting ready to take off. Pretty scary.
About 6 rookies got partnered with a veteran team or went solo. The other 12 attended workshops, hand on build sessions, and other support activities at the Kell Robotics Innovation Center, aka the 'IC'. We didn't take occupancy of the 'IC' until November 1st and held our 1st training sessions in December.
Mentors taught about 1/3 of the material and our team students about 2/3.
1) You need to get a good information kit out to the HR department of companies in the area and ask for mentors.
2) Recruit students to teach essentials of whatever topic is needed. Create a cascade of mentorship. Adult mentors-->student mentors-->rookies... You might not have a choice.
3) We do training sessions by appointment. We quickly evaluate the rookies and quickly adapt the training session to their need, the ability, and where we are on the calendar. Some groups will come in regularly and train over months. Some have had to come in and do a crash build. Trainers have to walk a fine line and manage time and resources and try to help the rookies get a toehold and get excited about what they are doing.
4) Find adult mentors to keep in contact and monitor all rookies. During the build season at the end of week two some MUST do a site visit with the team. I can tell you horror stories about what rookie teams have been doing that have not properly been monitored.
5) Call a mentor / coach meeting. For example, we recently held the GeorgiaFIRST MAC meeting, the Mentor Advisory Conference. We held it at a conference center at Kennesaw State University. After opening the meeting ask the crowd for concerns and questions and wrote them on the board. We had a dozen or so and I facilitated a very interactive guided discussion of the crowd.. Great interaction between rookie and veteran mentors. Very productive format. It is very important to train mentors. They need to understand the schedule of the year, how they can help, and frankly will need some guidance to help them get into a mode where they are working with high school students that have not so much knowledge.
6) This past weekend we had training happen at two sites. In the morning we were at the GeorgiaFIRST full size official FRC field. It is hosted at the Walton Robotics site. There we had rookies tryout driving this pasts years robots that were on the field. Then we went to lunch and then to the Kell 'IC'. All afternoon was basic training. We covered the competition, pit setup, judging, programming, mechanical design, and more. We have a permanent 'pit' setup at the IC. Between experiencing the field at the Walton site, the pit at the 'IC', and a lot of training, these rookies are making some progress. These rookies will be in the 'IC' for many more sessions.
7) Train, Train, Train. We have been training rookies all this past summer and will be doing more from here to the competition. Training will be uneven across teams. If you can figure out how to even it up, go for it. If you can create opportunities to train teams, people will take advantage of that 12 months a year.
8) Training needs to get them excited early. If on the 1st day a rookie can create a Java linetracker project, have them add two joysticks and tankdrive, download it and go, that will fire them up. Understanding will come later.
9) Information push to the teams - a) Chiefdelphi is a good forum for getting quick answers to problems, not too good for quickly getting to organized information about 'standard topics'. b) We created the
www.the-innovation-center.org website to help teams get fast answers to training and supplier questions. It is NOT a forum but hopefully an evolving catalog of easy to access useful information. You are not going to have time to answer the same supplier and training questions for 20 teams, over and over. We hope the 'IC' website will be useful. We will see. If you know of information that should be there, let me know.
10) Find some robots to help do the training with. Get some teams to collaborate. Fortunately we have a fleet of 7 cRio based systems so we can have multiple parallel breakout groups. 'Smaller class' size = ( number of students ) / robot.
Creating a mentor training/conference will take the resources of several mentors and some promotion and coordination from your Regional Director.
If the rest of the country is anything like Georgia, getting the word out about FIRST isn't the big issue anymore. Responding to the growth is the real challenge.