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Re: Company Employee Robotics Mentoring Teams
Building a robot together sounds like fun. Where do you get your parts and control system?
The southern California mentors once took a Saturday where engineers built Vex robots to compete against students as a one day event.
Nothing much happens during the summer, as a lot of people take their vacation then. We need time away from robotics to keep our families happy. Burnout is a real danger, especially for the engineers with families.
In the Fall we start visiting schools - both pre-rookies and established teams are meeting once or twice a week now. We usually organize a robotics exhibition over lunch in the company cafeterias to engage potential mentors. Teams bring in their robots, demonstrate them, and talk to employees describing what they do.
As a fallout of one of these lunchtime recruitment efforts, some non-mentor engineers asked to use one of the demo'ed robots and worked with students and pilots on a company sponsored research project. We made the robot react according to air models, so it "flew" like an aircraft. That was kind of cool.
We run training sessions for company engineers, like last year's cRIO-based control system, and the basics for any rookie mentors.
We've also got FLL and FTC teams getting busy in the fall.
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"Rationality is our distinguishing characteristic - it's what sets us apart from the beasts." - Aristotle
Last edited by Mark McLeod : 17-09-2009 at 11:07.
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