Our team has held a pre-ship event on the Saturday before ship day called Austin Robot Roundup, for the past two years. You can find the details of this past year's event
here. It did require a lot of hard work and coordination, but in the end it was all worth it. We built a full size course which came in very useful for practicing on our own, and allowing area teams, especially rookies, to get some practice before the regional. We also used the event as a way to get community involvement, and ended up having about 400 people attend, most of whom were from the general public who just came to watch the excitement.