Recruiting Students to Teams with "non-Standard" Locations

[James1902]

Hey Chris,

Exploding Bacon is one of the 'non-high school' based teams and we have been dealing with this problem for a while now. We have students from I think 10 different schools now and 4 different counties (including middle school students and home school students.)

We have had a steady student population of about 30 for the last 4 years or so. We've done this by saturating our community with outreach events, LEGO summer camps, LEGO teams, demos, more outreach events, bringing the robot to sponsors facilities, team members schools, 4-H events, movie premiers, department stores, local news stations, the Orlando Science Center, weekend long conferences for businesses like IBM and PTC, the list goes on and on and on.

We try to keep track of all of our outreach events and it usually hovers around 1.3 per week. We have become Level 50 packing ninjas by loading and unloading 120 pound robots into my mothers 2002 Toyota Sienna van multiple times per week.

In addition to our outreaches we also sponsor a number of FLL teams each year (this year the number is 5) and that helps to keep a constant flow of replacement freshman whenever a new class of seniors graduate.

Now, it sounds like you're already doing some outreach to limited success. My suggestion is to try doing demos in a wider variety of venues. For instance we have gotten a number of students by bringing our FRC robot and a number of smaller Vex bots to our local mall. Also I would suggest looking into any local FLL teams and bringing the robot to them. At Bacon about 20 percent of our students started with LEGO then joined our team after they had gone on to High School.

That's all I can think of for now.

Keep working at it, and if there is anything we can help with let us know.
-James T. Austin