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Unread 05-05-2006, 21:04
Donut Donut is offline
The Arizona Mentor
AKA: Andrew
FRC #2662 (RoboKrew)
Team Role: Engineer
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Rookie Year: 2004
Location: Goodyear, AZ
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Re: Training for the upcoming underclassmen?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Not2B
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...)
Actually, we usually meet every Wednesday after school for 1 to 2 hours during the fall. Officers have their own meeting to discuss a few things too. The big thing we are missing there is sub-team meetings (none), partially because we've never really "forced" people onto teams and many people don't choose teams until further in (we've had people switch the build team they're on part way through build season before).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Not2B
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.
This has probably been the real killer of that available time though. We've never tried a full scale robot, instead we've attempted sumo-bots and things like that 3 different years, but still had bad results because...
1. We have no permanent classroom or anything to leave stuff around in, so anytime we want to build stuff we must get it out of the closet, move it to the other room, then end early enough to get everything back in.
2. We had to meet right after school during the fall, and most (if not all) mentors are not able to come this early to help teach things. The teachers at the school cannot really help because we have no teachers that teach anything about robotics (no robotics class, no engineering class, no metal working class, no electricity or circuit classes, and potentially no programming classes within the next few years), and the teachers of somewhat related subjects (programming, physics, building trades) are unable to help due to commitments with other clubs.
3. Summers seem to be cursed when it comes to meetings, so the officers usually have not planned anything out ahead of time and are trying to decide what to do for the fall, during the fall.

We did manage to actually build and compete using sumo-bots one year, but they were still an ineffective teaching tool, for whatever reason.

I like your ideas for cheaper less time consuming options. Money is not really a problem, though if we need to buy anything that can't be bought from pocket money it will need to be done far in advance since the PO system takes so long.

I'll post some of the things I'm thinking of later on, when we actually start getting down to planning. We're thinking of things right now, but for now are making sure everything gets finished and set up for next year to actually have a club.