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Unread 12-03-2016, 13:38
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gblake gblake is offline
6th Gear Developer; Mentor
AKA: Blake Ross
no team (6th Gear)
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Join Date: May 2006
Rookie Year: 2006
Location: Virginia
Posts: 1,934
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Re: Help starting a team. Unusual situation

Assuming a community is able to put a good foundation under its FRC teams, I think it's good whenever FRC spreads past the boundaries of schools and into the rest of the community. In the right circumstances that equals successfully changing the community.

You have a business plan. I assume that means that you have a low risk way to pay for registering, buying up to $6000 in parts (robot plus driver station plus plus waste/spares), building practice field elements, traveling to (and registering for) one or more competitions, and buying a modest collection of tools.

I'm not sure how you would get your tools to your robot construction location, but locations that come to mind are
  • Temporarily empty chunks/suites of strip malls or small-business buildings
  • Locations your state/local 4H folks know about (sometimes laws give 4H free use of many taxpayer-funded facilities)
  • Home garages (especially if someone is will to park a boat or car (or airplane?) elsewhere for a while)
  • Local machine shops / building material suppliers / etc.
  • Temporarily empty city/county/state floorspace
  • Fairgrounds or seasonal businesses
  • "Maker" spaces
  • Boy/Girl Scout facilities
  • Any business with a warehouse
I do applaud your desire to stand up a team, so long as it's done to create an exemplar of both graciousness and professionalism, that adds to your community, and that reduces rather than exacerbates any current problems.

But ... unless you feel like you simply have to throw cash into a fireplace (some folks do), or you will be satisfied to just build, program and control a very simple machine for each of the next few years; think really, really hard about whether registering as 2 or 3, FTC or VEX teams wouldn't be the better thing to do.

I have occasionally been tempted to "build a simple machine once every 2 or 3 years", so I can understand that sort of motivation. If that is what you are doing, please do remember the many differences between a team that will stick around for the next decade, and one that is a flash in the pan for you and a few buddies; then plan accordingly (including planning what will happen at the end of those few years to everything the team has accumulated).

Blake
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Blake Ross, For emailing me, in the verizon.net domain, I am blake
VRC Team Mentor, FTC volunteer, 5th Gear Developer, Husband, Father, Triangle Fraternity Alumnus (ky 76), U Ky BSEE, Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, Kentucky Colonel
Words/phrases I avoid: basis, mitigate, leveraging, transitioning, impact (instead of affect/effect), facilitate, programmatic, problematic, issue (instead of problem), latency (instead of delay), dependency (instead of prerequisite), connectivity, usage & utilize (instead of use), downed, functionality, functional, power on, descore, alumni (instead of alumnus/alumna), the enterprise, methodology, nomenclature, form factor (instead of size or shape), competency, modality, provided(with), provision(ing), irregardless/irrespective, signage, colorized, pulsating, ideate
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