I was looking forward to talk about my off-season idea in the Forum!!
I want every student in the school to have the option to participate on this project. The idea I have is the following: we divide all the participating students in three small teams and do a "mini-FIRST" at our school. We will create a game and they will have a limited time to build the robots to play. The robots will be smaller then FIRST's robots so they will be cheaper, and we will use previous year's controllers, eletrical components, motors, wood, aluminum, etc, so the cost of this project will be very small.
But why three teams?? To have a competition! Four would be too much, we have few alumnis and mentors, and two wouldn't be fun to play always against each other.
The only goal will be increasing the kids' knowledge and experience, and not "making worth the money we are spending" (that happens sometimes in many teams). So if by the end of this project we have three robots that don't work really well BUT the kids created most of it and learned how to solve problems, etc. (all that amazing stuff FIRST gives us and you all know), our job will be done, and we will have a better team next year!
We don't want to have only the kids that already like robotics, we want to introduce science and technology to the other ones too.
I know this kind of thing is not new at all (I have already called it "mini-FIRST") but making it all inside the school MAY be new.
We will have a meeting on wednesday to discuss it, I hope it works!!
Please tell me if you have already done something similar.
Opinions and suggestions will be apreciated!!
If you don't want to write about it here, send a private msg or an e-mail to me, please!
digocr@hotmail.com