Our classroom used to be a math room, so we had to find storage to have all our parts out of sight. We wound up with rolling locker sorta units, and each is sorted by subsystem.
Things that you'll want to have on hand:
- bearings, many sizes
- shaft stock, varying diameter/length
- sprockets, chain, pulleys
- old motors
- old metal parts: prototyping is easy when you can slap something together out of old year's bots
- wheels of varying size
- wire. save ALL old electronics
For us, if it's not trash we save it. I'll go around our shop and take some photos of how we're set up, we've been doing it since 97.