Quote:
Originally Posted by SarahBeth
I am one of those people that have a lot of good ideas about web sites, but not necessarily the skills to execute them (even though that's changing this year - I'm going to be taking over the web site design because the person who did it last year doesn't have time this year). We're starting from scratch so to speak, but I'm using what we have as a jumping off point.
I went and looked at a LOT of other teams' web sites - I noticed what I liked and what I thought we could integrate relatively easily into ours. I noticed that most of them were clean, easy to read, and easy to navigate. Then I went through our web site and wrote down stuff that I wanted to change - all the content changes, the students can do. The web changes themselves, I need to do. The coding is in dreamweaver, which is pretty easy to use and probably what yours is in too. Check with the web design teacher. 
As far as recruiting, its important to reach out to other teachers and students in your school, as well as the community. Its helpful if you have an in-building person to be your liaison, your voice to the administration so to speak. We lost 10 seniors this year and were kind of worried, but had a mixer last month and had 17 new kids (not just freshmen either!) come. We have a freshman orientation day and did a demo in the auditorium, which included them coming up on stage if they wanted to shoot the robot. We also had the school announcements promote the mixer every day leading up to it, which I think contributed to it too. Tell your current students to tell their friends, and bring their friends to meetings. We have a really good mix of students on our team - not just strictly mechanical or nerdy - but lots of creative types too, which is awesome - creative people tend to look at the world differently and sometimes you need that!
Wow, long post was long! Sorry! But good luck with everything. |
Seventeen people? Oh my goodness, that's awesome! I really like the idea that you give potential teammates the chance to play with the bot during a presentation. I'll have to suggest that for our assembly this year.
The trouble our team has with friend recruiting is that we're all good friends with each other, and other friends we have have more than likely scoped out the team and decided it wasn't for them. We do try, though! Luckily we are starting to mix the technical and artsy, so that has opened some doors.
Thank you for your recruiting tips! I appreciate it. --Celia