[CrazyCarl461]

FIRST Alumni are anyone who has participated in FIRST in high school or, in the case of college-run teams, participated as a college mentor and are no longer involved with a team. This is usually because they move to a new city and start working a fresh new job and FIRST gets pushed down the priority list. I have dozens of friends from Purdue alone who are now scattered around the country working and going about their non-FIRST lives. Sometimes they can be brought back into the program if approached by a local team. 461 recently got an engineer from the local Caterpillar plant who was on a team in another city to stop by meetings this fall.

I'm not sure where FIRST gets their list of potential mentors willing to help, but it probably has something to do with the push the past few years (Dean's homework) to gather information about team alumni. The form had a place to indicate if you would be willing to continue involvement in the future.

College mentors are a similar case, they are usually former high school participants who want to continue the experience. We have found this is a good way to keep getting an infusion of different design philosophies from different teams from around the country every few years.

As for the kit bot, that will make more sense when you pick up your rookie version of the kit of parts. It includes a bolt-together chassis frame that is pre-built to be within the size constraints and work with bumpers, kit gearboxes and kit wheels. It limits you a little in design configurations but it provides a robust drive system that takes only minutes to set up, allowing you to focus completely on the other robot mechanisms. It is also a good way to get something up and driving to give your team practice driving and using the cRio platform early in the build season.