[A Dog IRL]

Hey there!

I'm a soon-to-be alum for 5196 and I have some quick questions that Google couldn't necessarily help me solve. I started the team at my high school this year and the students, mentors, and parents, had a fantastic experience. I really want to continue this next year since I am going to college relatively close and I can mentor the team, along with some friends that helped me start it that are going to college nearby as well. My only issue is that I can't find any resources on how to be a more successful team the second year over the first year.

This year, we did not do very much fundraising. Right now I am working with two other members to create a fundraising "guide" that others on the team can use over the summer to send out to companies and organizations and raise support for our team. Are there any resources specifically for newly made teams about fundraising?

Our robot this year was not nearly up-to-par with much more veteran teams, which is understandable, but the entire team wants to be a known name throughout FRC and FIRST (it was actually quite fun at St. Louis when you walk around and you hear your name being mumbled). What kind of steps should we be taking to ensure that next year, we have a lot more time in build season to practice, as well as have a much better robot?

We are using LabVIEW to program the robot and it has proven quite handy in teaching people the basics, compared to text based programming like C++ or Java (shoutout to 357 for helping us immensely in Archimedes). A mentor and myself programmed the robot this year, and we don't really have anyone stepping up to the plate to learn about LabVIEW. How can we encourage students to want to participate with the programming, as well as other areas of robot design, next year?

Lastly, we aren't really sure what it takes to run a team. The documents and permission slips and other things aren't published on a lot of teams' websites so we don't know what to model ours after. Is there some kind of list of resources we need to provide, such as a team handbook and consent forms (for local machine shops, that kind of thing), online somewhere?

I really want this team to be successful, and I'm sure everyone else on the team wants it to be as well. We're trying to recruit a lot more kids in our school (we're at 15 people on the team right now, more than half of which are freshmen) but we're also running into some stumps. How can we recruit more people, including people who aren't into robotics as much? The main issue for us, I think, is that everyone who hears about a "robotics team" is intimidated and thinks they'll be marked as a nerd or something for joining. That presents a problem because we need strong leaders who might not be super interested in robotics, but could help lead the team, say, financially.

I will probably think of a few more questions, but I'll refrain from adding them to the thread because I don't want to spend too much of someone else's time answering these. Feel free to shoot me a PM and we can talk there, via email, or even on Skype if you want.

Thanks!