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Unread 29-03-2006, 14:42
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Vikesrock Vikesrock is offline
Team 2175 Founder
AKA: Kevin O'Connor
no team
Team Role: Engineer
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Rookie Year: 2007
Location: Manchester, NH
Posts: 3,305
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Looking to Start an FRC Team

**I realize it is competition season and many of you are very busy, feel free to skip down to the questions or not respond at all, I completely understand.

Hi my name is Kevin O'Connor, and I'm a FIRSTaholic.

Now that we got that out of the way I'll start with a little information about myself. I'm a junior in High School at Math and Science Academy in Woodbury, MN. I have been participating in FLL for 6 years, 4 as a competitor and 2 as a mentor. This year I earned the Youth Mentor of the Year award for my efforts in helping my younger brothers team reach 4th place at state in their first year of competition. My high school, MSA, is the largest participant in the state by number of teams (7), despite having only 350 students in grades 6-12. Despite this huge participation in FLL, there are very few high school age students interested in MN's high school FLL program. I have found that the main reason for this is Lego's just aren't cool by the time you get into high school.

That brings me to my goal, I am attempting to start an FRC team at my school for next season ('06-'07). I have checked out the webcasts of the Boston and Sacramento regionals, every FIRST podcast I could find, the FIRST Starting a Team FAQ, the ASME guide to starting a team and the 2006 FIRST Robotics Competition Game manual in an effort to learn everything I can about how FRC works. I have also read the thread regarding starting a team in Syracuse and looked through any material referenced there.

Here are the questions I still have about the whole process:

1. Do you think it is possible for a HS Junior to be the driving force behind a team starting? Adult leadership seems to be much more of a factor in FRC than it is in FLL, how important is it to have parents that are willing to be heavily involved? Are the Adult leaders usually parents or are they usually mentors/engineers from the community?

2. What type of equipment do we need to have to build the robot? Do most teams use the machine shops of sponsoring corporations or schools?

3. What kinds of places do your teams use to set up the playing field? How much room is required for storage of the robot, parts, and playing field elements?
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