Quote:
Originally Posted by PVCpirate
If your school has an "8th grade day" or something similar where incoming freshmen go and see all the different clubs and activities they can participate in, you should definitely be there with your robot. My team always gets a big crowd of freshmen around their booth, and a couple of those students will usually show up to our 1st meeting each year. As far as retaining students, I would suggest using an FTC or VEX competition to engage new students and give them experience with a "build season" and the design process. Just make sure they are the ones doing the work so that they can learn.
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As I hinted at above, we focus heavily on recruiting middle school students and incoming freshmen because we
want them to be on the team for four years. They get so much more out of it, and the number of veteran members increases, our team gets stronger, and in turn, new members get a better experience learning from a larger number of veterans (we pair new students to veterans 1:1 in a Peer Mentoring system). It's a virtuous cycle.
Interestingly, our 2nd largest group of new members after freshman is seniors.