I mentor both FRC and FTC. I've never liked looking at FTC as "Intro to FRC" or "FRC lite", I think it's a good program on it's own, especially for students who participate in lots of other extra-curriculars, and don't have the free time it takes to commit to FRC.
BadgerBOTS, our organization and corporation (with the same name as the FRC team that spawned it), has five FTC teams running under it, completely separate from the FRC team. These teams are made up of students from area high schools who generally don't have time for FRC, or who just wanted to do their own thing.
That all said, I don't think FTC is the best thing FRC students can do to prepare for the FRC season. In fact, I think it's a pretty bad thing to do to prepare.
First off, the FRC and FTC seasons overlap.
This means one of two things: You work with FRC-level dedication and speed to finish an FTC robot before the FRC build season starts, and essentially double the amount of stress and time you have to put into that part of the year. Keep in mind that your mentors (who often have busy lives of their own and barely enough time for FRC as it is) will have to do the same. Definitely an "out of the frying pan, into the fire" scenario when that season changeover hits.
Also, depending on when your regional FTC competition is, you may have to take time out of your FRC build season to go compete. Yeah, it's only a couple days, but just like FRC regionals, the students and mentors involved will be quite exhausted by the end.
Or, you spend less time during the FTC season (though keep in mind that it is still a pretty hefty amount of time) to have your FTC bot mostly finished when FRC starts, and then try to work on both simultaneously. And there's just about no scenario where I can see both of them succeeding. The FRC season is crazy enough as it is.
Our FRC team prepares for it's season by working on various off-season projects. This year, we've been building a dedicated "DemoBot" to be taken to schools, conventions, businesses, community events, and general outreach events.
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Originally Posted by jijiglobe
So our FRC team started a smaller FTC team to practice during the pre build season. The idea was to give new team members something to do and to help them learn some engineering. It was a catastrophic failure. The team's faculty supervisor couldn't put in as many hours as the FRC build season (this is to be expected) and the FTC robot was unfinished when the FRC build started. A group of team members decided to leave FRC to join FTC. Our team prioritizes FRC so FTC is always allocated a miniscule budget and everyone ends up the worse. I'm sure some teams with a larger budget and a little more time might be able to pull it off.
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I think your funding issue stems from the fact that you expect both teams to pull from the same budget. If you have students who have moved completely to FTC, then I think it's time that you start treating the FTC team as a separate entity, responsible for it's own fundraising, and recruiting it's own mentors. That's how we handle it anyway. That said, we're a pretty large organization, between FRC, FTC, FLL, farm teams, summer camps, and other classes, we work with several hundred students a year.