What does your team do on the off-season?

[157#1Driver]

I was just wondering what other teams do on their off-season. Do they sit around and wait til January, show off the robot, go to other competitions??

[Trashed20]

we say every year that we are going to fundraise over the summer but we only had two pop bottle drives last year in which we only made $80 ($30 of which was mine) then whe school starts up we do a candy drive and work on publicity stuff (t-shirts, buttons, handouts, buttons, flyers, buttons, website, did i mention buttons? we had about 74 designs this year oops, i think we over did it. it was still fun.) we also have the new animation slave-err... members learn the software and stuff. so to answer your question, nothing.

[Ricky Q.]

Well this summer we will continue to fundraise, show off the robot(s), and we are going to resume building balance bot, that we started before the season this year, just for mroe practice/learning. We also are planning to goto the IRI just for some more competition fun.

[Chubtoad]

Last summer we actually re-built the machine from (then) Two years ago, and we made another two bases to test out drive systems. We have one really cool one, but this year's field did not call for it, which was a huge surprise based on past years'. We actually plan on Re-doing our the "MST ROOM" which is the classroom for the School's Math, Science and Tech program, but the room we use for robotics. As well we plan on harassing, I mean.. coersing companies for funds and preparing new programs to introduce to younger schools as well as trying to talk to people form Other districts to get them to start teams! This year we want to do summer the FIRST way and spread THE word. The Word of FIRST.

[srawls]

last year we did a lot of demos and stuff. this year i'm trying to get our team to work on a prototype drive train and some cool electronics stuff. hopefully we'll get something done, and be able to use it next year.

Stephen

[Digo]

I was looking forward to talk about my off-season idea in the Forum!!

I want every student in the school to have the option to participate on this project. The idea I have is the following: we divide all the participating students in three small teams and do a "mini-FIRST" at our school. We will create a game and they will have a limited time to build the robots to play. The robots will be smaller then FIRST's robots so they will be cheaper, and we will use previous year's controllers, eletrical components, motors, wood, aluminum, etc, so the cost of this project will be very small.
But why three teams?? To have a competition! Four would be too much, we have few alumnis and mentors, and two wouldn't be fun to play always against each other.
The only goal will be increasing the kids' knowledge and experience, and not "making worth the money we are spending" (that happens sometimes in many teams). So if by the end of this project we have three robots that don't work really well BUT the kids created most of it and learned how to solve problems, etc. (all that amazing stuff FIRST gives us and you all know), our job will be done, and we will have a better team next year!
We don't want to have only the kids that already like robotics, we want to introduce science and technology to the other ones too.

I know this kind of thing is not new at all (I have already called it "mini-FIRST") but making it all inside the school MAY be new.

We will have a meeting on wednesday to discuss it, I hope it works!!

Please tell me if you have already done something similar.
Opinions and suggestions will be apreciated!!
If you don't want to write about it here, send a private msg or an e-mail to me, please! digocr@hotmail.com

[asher]

Our team has done a tiny tiny FIRST (a dice game, the hardest thing I've ever had to build, it was all so tiny) as well as the BEST competition and our university hosts another small competition for area high schools. The college girls from our team also build a battle bot, so we have no off season what so ever. I really love the "mini FIRST" events we have, its just always more challenging to make it all that small, Ah what I wouldn't give for some time off.

Ashley

[Jessi]

team 234 also always talks about fundraising in the summer but somehow we never do it as much as we had planned. i think we are definitely going to do some major funraising as well as demos, workshops that kind of stuff this summer and fall.

jessi

[Justin 188]

We have some sort of fundraising campaign every year - we've found the most profitable one to be Magazine subscription sales, but we also do other things. Also, in the months before robotics (September-december), we have robot demos at local elementary schools, and we also have a demo at various sponsor science/technology events.

[Jim Giacchi]

Off-Season?

That must be like that sleep, family and food other than pizza that I keep hearing about.

[Quain]

Yea... in the "off-season" I do that thing that people call... sleep.. cause we get little of it while building is happening... but we still do fundraising and such... go over possible ideas for possible game objectives... yadda yadda yadda... you'll think of stuff

[Elyse Holguin]

There's an off season?? I think the time that COULD be an off season is spent trying to fascinate little kids in all of the lego leagues around here to actually join FIRST, and going around to elementary and middle schools showing off the robot, and the team is pretty close, and we go bowling and stuff, which could be considered off- season activities if we didn't do it after practices anyway.... We do invitationals too, and we open CDI to the local catholic high school, so then we really aren't team hammond anymore, we go by the spiffy name of Triple Threat - Beatty, School City of Hammond, and Bishop Noll Institute. We also go around intimidating new people into joining the team, which doesn't really work, so I don't think they take us seriously when we say we're going o make the robot tp their house.... oh well

Elyse - Team 71

[David Noll]

We come up with great designs and schemes to not only amuse ourselves but grow membership and town interest... it always sounds great. But we do participate in our towns 4th of July parade, aside from the good publicity it is so much fun. Last year one of our "cars" broke down so three of us picked it up and ran it onto a side street, the cops thought it was hilarious
This year, cause we haven't all heard that before, we want to do fun projects that will give us practice (hover cart, D-battery launcher, go-kart, pivot drop mount on robot to hold paintball gun) , and recruit kids to our FRC program. The one thing we have learned, it is a great time to introduce younger students to FLL and vex.

[Katie_UPS]

Our team does A LOT of demos...
We don't think of fundraising untill its build season, but I guess our mentors remind us that we need sponsors.
Also, though, team members mentor FLL treams, and one of our mentors created the Milwaukee Vex League, so we mentor/participate in that also.

Creating buttons and other logistical stuff is something I should recommend... Its hard to make 500+ buttons when a robot needs to be built....

And this year we're teaching "noobs" programming, CADing, animation, and possibly other feilds pre-build.

[DonRotolo]

Community service projects, fundraising, demos, and in the fall we run Pi-Tech Academy to bring new members up to speed and let veterans try their ideas before the build season.

[shameless_plug]
Oh, and this year we're running an off-season event in October - Pascack Panda-monium
[/shameless_plug]


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