[shyra1353]

Congratulations on wanting to start a new team and good luck with it. Im not going to lie, it is a lot of work, but it is all worth it. Dont give up. I started 1353 this year after changing schools.

If you look at that I started back in september/october you might get some ideas.

I ended up putting together a more comprehensive package than the one that is in this thread which I presented to two of the teachers at my school.

Here is how I ended up going about it (there are other ways, but this what worked for me):

First I went to a physics teacher at my school and told him a little background on FIRST and what a FIRST team does. He redirected me to the techie side of my school. I spoke to the woodshop teacher and the computers teacher (he does more than just computer classes (teaches programming, circuits, etc. ), if i remember his title i will edit and change it .. sorry its late right now) and told them pretty much the same thing. They told me to write a formal proposal outlining what FIRST is, the benefit to the school, the students, and the community, what it takes to have a team, the drawbacks, how much money it costs, and a few other things (if you would like me to send you a copy of the final proposal i wrote, pm or email me and i can do that)

After I wrote the proposal, I handed it in to the two teachers and was told to wait a few days. They discussed the idea of having a team and realized that it would involve a lot of time commitment on their part. They took this into consideration and told me that they would allow a team as long as it would be student run.

At this point, I made the mistake of not going to the principal and formally introducing myself to her and more importantly introducing FIRST to her. Had I met with her at that time, I would have outlined all the details in the proposal and left her with a copy as well as ask if she had any suggestions for our team.

The next part is getting a team together. Some can argue that this can be done before because it would look better when proposing the idea. Saying a group of students is interested would be more appealing to the school than saying that one student is interested and the idea might spread. If you can do this before going to the staff, then it is a good thing to do. If not, its all right too.

To get a team together, I put an announcement in for the morning announcements (I am not sure if your school has those). It basically said if you are interested in engineering and/or programming then come to a meeting on this day at this time, etc.. I let it run in the announcements for about a week so that I knew that everyone had heard it.

Then at the first meeting, I introduced the team to what FIRST was through my talking and a bunch of pictures of the competition last year and robots from last year. Over the next few meetings, the idea sank in and I showed them some videos as well. The people who were interested stayed, and those who werent dropped out.


I hope this helps you and I wish you all the best. I know how hard it can be, and how frustrating it can get, but it will all be worth it. I know that your situation is different from mine, but hopefully you will be able to benefit from this post. Good luck with starting a team. If you think that I can help you in any way, feel free to contact me.