[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by lynca

In the past, I recommended many schools to start FRC teams. Now I am much more cautious and ask many more questions.

Questions for potential FRC rookies:
1. How long has the program being doing STEM activities (FTC, VEX...) ?
2. Is the teacher willing to commit for multiple years ?
3. Does the team have mentors in place ?
4. Will the team be able to have sponsors for year 3 and beyond ?

Are there other questions that need to be asked before schools consider FRC ?

• Would your team be able to continue after the departure of any one mentor?
• Do you have a model for sustaining the "operational knowledge base" of the team (i.e. making sure important knowledge gets passed on and thus does not vanish with member turnover)?
• Are your students motivated, or will they just be watching the mentors work?
• Do you have a clear plan for team logistics and organization? Is that plan sustainable for multiple years?

I agree that people are not nearly as cautious as they should be when starting FRC teams. I think this is in part because FIRST themselves do not do a particularly good job of indicating just how difficult it is to get a sustainable team running. There's a bit of conflict-of-interest there, I think, as FIRST clearly wants to see as much growth as possible, but there are drawbacks when large numbers of rookie teams fall through the cracks and disappear after their first year.

I also think there needs to be more emphasis on developing robust, distributed organizational structures that are resistant to turnover and mentor loss. I do not think the "one or two passionate mentor(s) holding a team together" model is a fundamentally sound one, and there needs to be some hard thought towards how to avoid it.