[A Dog IRL]

Originally Posted by Josh Fox

Ours is the Team RUSH Toolkit for Success.

PS As a huge Breaking Bad fan, I'm definitely a huge Breaking Bot fan as well! Good luck in the future.

Downloaded now! I will review it tonight when I am feeling better (apparently struck with the St. Louis sickness that's been going around). Thank you!
We might be doing mass shirt trades depending on how many people want them. Shh.

Originally Posted by Jay O'Donnell

I can answer questions 2 and 5 at least...
For having a better robot and build season in general, the best thing to do is spend more time going over game analysis and design, so that build goes a lot smoother. The biggest thing to remember is build within your resources and don't try to do everything if you know you won't be able to. As for recruiting new members, we send flyers around the school to get interest going, but the more important part is keeping the new students invested during their first few meetings. We participate in a local VEX competition run by WPI and have two teams of freshman with the upperclassmen acting as mentors. Hope that helps!

We are definitely going to plan everything out more. We actually spent the entire 6 weeks building the robot and had almost no time to practice driving. Now we realize how much planning beforehand (robot frame and drivetrain) and finalizing a design in the first week really matter. We will try sending flyers out. Thank you!

Originally Posted by AlexD744

By far the most beneficial thing they did was getting a class period for robotics. It let people experience the team without having to commit a lot of after-school time, in addition to getting elective credit.

Long replies are the best! We actually talked to our new club sponsor, the engineering teacher at our school, about turning robotics into a class and he said he will make the senior and junior levels into solely robotics classes! Very excited about that.

Originally Posted by AlexD744

Another thing to help get people excited is to do a trip early in the school year and make the emphasis on having fun. There's at least one off-season in Florida next fall, Panther Prowl. Info found here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=128591

We are planning on attending this with some changes to the robot. Trying to scrape up funds for travel, hotels, and all that stuff so we can have more than two weeks to plan for the trip! c:

Originally Posted by AlexD744

From our experience, the best fundraising you can do though is to find lasting partnerships in the community. Chances are someone on your team or in your school knows someone who knows someone who works with a company/business that would be willing to support your team. Fundraising is great and important, but in order to be sustainable, you'll want several partnerships with sponsors, and from our experience, most of those have come from personal contacts.

Thank you for the link to the toolkit. We are already talking to students and their parents about contacting friends and family that may own businesses. This summer we will be going around to local businesses.

Originally Posted by AlexD744

If you have the resources, you could also do mini-projects during the fall to help prepare for build season, get people working on tools, get people used to working in teams, etc. If you don't have the resources, work on getting them so in future years you can do these projects. Regardless, you can train programmers using this years robot.

We are working on a chassis and swerve drive train this summer to teach people about programming, mechanics, and electronics!

Originally Posted by AlexD744

Lastly, don't get overwhelmed! If it seems like a lot, break things down into smaller bits. You're clearly of to a great start, with a well deserved RAS to prove it! If your teams finds itself in a serious jam come fall, contact the regional director (for South Florida I believe it's Sandra Contreras). This person is there to help the teams and will do what they can to ensure a team doesn't fall apart!

We are actually in contact with Sandra and talking to her a bunch about how to continue. And thank you!

Originally Posted by AlexD744

And actually, I almost forgot. Being a college student involved with a team (to a small degree), I want to caution: Be careful being a mentor in college. Everyone takes college differently, and it's ultimately up to you to find what is best for you, but a lot of people can't handle mentoring while in college. The transition from student to mentor is also a tricky thing to navigate. If you search, you'll find plenty of threads on here about this subject that I suggest you read before making the decision to mentor.

Will take that into account, I'll have to do some more reading later.

Thank you for your response, AlexD744! I'll actually email you/your team sometime soon about perhaps mentoring us through next year!