First an update to the LEAP (Linking Engineering And Philanthropy) competition with OMSI kicking off Nov 20th. This is now open to high school FTC teams as well as FRC teams. Pass the word to any FTC teams you might be in contact with.
There have been questions about how big a LEAP team needs to be and the time commitment. Kevin Kearns, the VP of Exhibits at OMSI, has run these kinds of competitions before in his previous position in Vancouver BC. In his experience the concept quality of the entries are quite decoupled from the time teams have to generate them. Sometimes he gives teams weeks and sometimes a day and the resulting idea quality doesn’t change much. What would change in our case is the quality of the CADs and other presentation materials. It’s up to you how far to go in that regard. It being the first year for LEAP I wouldn’t expect teams to go crazy.
You can make some educated guesses as to the other constraints that will be unveiled on kickoff night Nov 20th. If your team has already brainstormed some exhibit ideas, you can select from those when the contest details are announced and hit the ground running. From there, I’ll bet three people would be able to generate a credible entry assuming at least one of them is up to speed on CAD. If the teams get too big they would be hard to manage so I’d recommend LEAP teams in the 3-8 people range.
Autodesk has put up some serious money for prizes for LEAP. Don’t leave it on the table. We’re capping the number of LEAP teams at 20, first come first served.
Go to
www.team1540.org/leap for details and registration. You can register up to three teams if you have enough people interested.