Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Ray
As mentioned by Ben Martin above you may be able to obtain part or even all of the field carpet from your regional or district competition as we have. We convinced our district to repurpose a technology classroom with a twenty foot ceiling to become our shop. Since it had a loft for storage, we made that our actual shop and the downstairs area a 3/4 field. For the past two years it served well enough to not have any drawbacks. In fact, for 2014 we had a full court frisbee shooter and just used the diagonal of the room to make the correct distance for the shot.
Actually convincing the district to make the room a dedicated robotics room took many years of effort. We strongly subscribe to Karthik's belief that you need to create a "culture" of STEM or robotics (I forgot the exact quote). We adhere strongly to the belief that winning over the community and parents on a large scale to the benefits of the program will help pave the way to get what you want/need to be successful. In our case we felt that the room for the playing field was paramount to success--even more so than having the district purchase some of the large machines which teams so often desire.
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What's funny is that is similar to what we are currently doing. We are going to use our current shop as a 1/2 field with some extra space for a table and some material storage. Then use a garage space for machining, another adjacent room for CAD, and yet another connected room for storage. We actually ironically sed the fact that you guys had one as a selling point to our district.