[Dale]

This year we are trying something new in the fall to get younger students up to speed. Our plan is to do a full FRC build but stretched over three months. We are building for our mock game. The idea being it should give us more time to really work through problems and do a lot more teaching. Also the robot will never compete so it's okay if it doesn't get finished or if it isn't perfect (it also probably won't be painted and no practice robot). This will be happening concurrently with our veteran students building for VEX Toss Up and also acting as teachers when the younger students run into problems during the build. We have two new mentors to train as well so they will be heavily involved in this process too.

Seconded. There really isn't anything like building a robot for a competition to get ready to build a robot for a competition. We've been designing and hosting the BunnyBots competition in Oregon for the last five years just for that reason. We split our team up into several subteams and each builds a robot from whatever is laying around the shop. We invite local teams to do the same and have a good-natured one day competition the first day of Winter Break.

If anyone wants to host one of these locally PM me.