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Originally Posted by Donut
Here's a question for all you teams that have been doing some kind of underclassmen training, if you are doing a mock game or fun robots or repairing robots, how do you get the time to do this in the fall? Are you a class (so you actually have in school time to do this), or do you make after school time?
Our team has always attempted to do some kind of teaching thing in the fall with miserable failures every single year, mainly due to a lack of time since it is hard to get teachers to spend that much time in the fall when they know they'll be spending so much in the spring (we are a club, not a team or class), and because at least 1/2 the club is typically in marching band, killing alot of the available after school time.
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We meet for 1.5 hours on weds, every week during the fall. It's a bit of time, maybe hard for your team to do. Now, sub-teams meet outside of those meetings as needed. (Animation learns the software on the weekends... mostly at midnight I think...)
Our ping pong ball game, straw tower, and mashmellow structure game takes 2 hours. 0:15 to explain, 1:15 to build and test, and 0:30 to run the game. Simple, and most importantly, CHEAP. No one has to buy anything. Most materials are donated by the office I work in, and I hit Office Max/Staples for everything else.
Robocode is totally free, and people work on it in their free time (use our website to work out issues.)
Don't try to do a full robot if you can't support it (time OR money). See what you CAN do, see what you WANT to teach, and find a way to fit them together. If you go to grand, and don't finish, you'll frustrate the new people. It's good to have several small successes early.
Example - I want to teach structures... but I can't take 20 hours, I can't get welding in the cafe we meet in, and I can't buy the materials. But I can get a box of straws and tape, and we can spend 2 hours building a tower to hold a 20 oz bottle of Mt. Dew (of which the winners get to sample.)