Thread: Fundamental skill sets for FTC / FRC
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Unread 18-09-2014, 23:46
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FTC / FRC mentor
AKA: Travis
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Join Date: May 2013
Rookie Year: 2011
Location: Oklahoma City
Posts: 139
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Re: Fundamental skill sets for FTC / FRC
Quote:
Originally Posted by tindleroot View Post
I think you guys have covered the technical aspects pretty well. While the website is a useful tool to have in robotics, it is not necessary to have a website group, so you may want to consider waiting a year or two before focusing on the website.
Agree on this - although with our younger teams having a web presence has been tremendously helpful for sponsorship / fundraising purposes.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tindleroot View Post
Another branch of robotics that is not technical but is important is community outreach. A team does not need to do outreach in order to field a robot, but one of Dean Kamen's goals in creating FIRST (For INSPIRATION and RECOGNITION of Science and Technology) is to get America more involved in engineering, inventing, and innovating. With this in mind, community outreach should be a big focus of any FIRST team, not just the robot and competition. Community outreach is also important if you are hopeful for receiving the Chairman's award (FRC) or the Inspire award (FTC). Keep this in mind when you are mentoring the team.
Thanks - I left that part out, partially because one thing the teams do great at are outreach / community service. They have not done a good job at documenting and presenting this fact to judges, though. For instance, for FTC last year they didn't fill out an engineering notebook (including info on the massive amount of outreach they did) -- which is required for most awards... so that is the first thing they are fixing this year.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoneri
Currently, because our team is part of a class at our school, we have started to require some knowledge in the areas involving the robot directly (Mechanical, Electrical, CAD design, CNC, and Programming) and it would be nice if this could spreed so that others can know a little of these and the other areas you have mentioned.
This is good info to know. Our school (that these teams represent) has a robotics class as well, and from what I can tell there has not been a clear focus on teaching these things in the past. I could be wrong. However, I know that this year is the first time they have ever tried using CAD as part of the design process, and I'm not sure how much planning and strategy has gone into previous year's robots.

So that brings up the question - does anyone have a FIRST robotics curriculum that they like that incorporates both FTC (Aug-Dec) and FRC (Jan-May)?
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