What Is Your Favorite Part Of FRC?

[Ankit S.]

I also agree with going to two regionals.

With that second regional, you have a chance to see more robots, different robots, and different designs. Those different designs might be what fuel you to make a different drivetrain. If one team has an innovative drivetrain, but goes to a regional thats far from your home, than you may lose the chance of seeing that drivetrain.

Also, many teams do better in their second regional than their first. Going to a second regional may keep the motivation higher if you do very well in your second regional.

One thing you could do is have the students pay for travel expenses and food; that is what our team does for our "away" regional.

This way you wont need to spend 7000 on that second regional, only ~4000. Thats an extra 3000 dollars in the bag.

If you do manage to get at least 12-15k as your budget this year, you should be going to that second regional.

As for leaving behind a legacy of CAD and design and prototyping, start teaching the team how to CAD, and start fully designing before fabrication.

Good luck.

[thefro526]

My favorite part of FRC?

The people.

Those people make robots seem uninteresting.

[XaulZan11]

One issue that I don't believe has been brought up in the 2nd regional or offseason prototyping discussion is that it can be very hard to get students excited and involved in working on stuff during the summer that they may never use again. While nearly all students are excited and involved in a second regional, you may be lucky to get 1/3 of the students involved in offseason testing. I agree that on paper, offseason prototyping probably provides the return on investment in terms of learning and increasing the chance of future success, but it may be hard to get potentially short sighted students on board.

My suggestion would be to combine both of these and attend a couple of offseasons. You can still do the prototyping, but this time it has a more practical application--the actual competition. You can do anything from tweaking existing systems, completing re-doing subsystems, using a completely new drivetrain, to building a brand new robot (check out 1625 from this year and I believe 2949 from 2010). Plus, you can train new drivers, pit crew and scouts at these events.

[Luckryan]

Originally Posted by thefro526

My favorite part of FRC?

The people.

Those people make robots seem uninteresting.

Originally Posted by 7h0m54

I felt that the "Other" option was worthy of being a replacement "All of the Above" option.

Both these things are true.. Getting teams members and really, new team members, to do things off season and during the summer are as people are saying really hard to do. I would say that if you do get money to do the 'off season' prototyping and stuff like that to do it not during the summer and wait to start till after school has started a little.