[ngreen]

Okay finally...It's been a tough week with three test in five days....I decided it was time for me to give an overview of what we did in Atlanta and possible ideas for plans for next year.

First come how everything went.

Thursday mid-morning another team member and I passed out 300 fliers. One to each team documenting a general list of the spare parts we have. A couple times Thursday and a couple times friday a couple of the team members went through the pit and started conversations with other teams. This was part of just learning about other teams from how they are organized and what things they as a team would like to how is the weather, how is your hotel, and are you enjoying your stay. From Thursday to Saturday we loan out 40-50 parts and tools. These included pneumatic parts and cyclinder, transmission parts, motors, velcro and many others. We recieve many request for parts we didn't have including certain sizes of cyclinders and wheels and motors we had depleted supplies of. And we received questions of how to couple pneumatic tubing to more tubing and patch/fix a flat pneumatic tire.

I was very happy with the amount of people we were able to help but I know there were many that we had to turn away because of lack of parts or expertise is at least one case. Also with the small amount of people we had trouble reaching out beyond our pit area a lot of the time.

This forum is built around improvement so I will offer my ideas for improvement and vision of what is possible and then I would love to hear some response in both what teams needs, how it could be done the best, if my ideas have any merit, and just any other thoughts that you have.

I can't gurantee any of this happens just because of the uncertainty involved with making the championship and working out of all the details within the team we may not have the manpower. Also, FIRST may have a say in what we can or can't do. So who knows. This is just brainstorming.

So here is my ideas:

First I think the NRLB could be moved out of our (1108) pit at championships. This would allow more teams to more easily involved. It would probably allow easier access to the NRLB for other teams. My thoughts would be to have a table set up near the real spare parts table. Here you could have teams bring a box of parts that they will not use on their robot and are willing to give or loan out to other teams. Can you imagine like thirty boxes of spares parts not avaliable at the spare parts table being loaned out next to the spare parts table? I think it would make it a lot easier on a lot of teams. It wouldn't be limited to spare parts either. You could make a short list of tools you have avaliable to loan out and the neat idea I like is mentors that you can loan out. Also since it is out of the 1108 pit we could set up a schedule where other teams could help work the table. This would be set up with match schedule and other things in mind.

This year the building relationship between teams was neglected because of lack of manpower. I've thought a lot about how to how we can better encourage this part of our agenda. And I'm a procrastinator when it comes to thinking of ideas so this idea came to me like 30 seconds ago. Maybe a meet your neighbors type of program or for you old guys that know everyone already (you know who you are), meet the rookies. There could be a sheet you fill out to get a prize, special pin, or maybe something more like a drawing for some shirts or something (I give daisy partial credit for this idea). Hmmm... There is more brainstorming to be done in this area which I probably should do with the team but I will look more into improving this.


So this is the short of what I've been thinking. I have some more ideas but would like some feedback on ideas and maybe a little more time to brainstorm them out.

Thanks for any input

BTW RogerR and sanddrag I owe you a pin and hug whenever I see you