Recruiting Students to Teams with "non-Standard" Locations

[CalTran]

Chris,
From what I read, it sounds like your program is similar to my school district's CAPS program. CAPS stands for the Center for Advanced Professional Studies. It's pretty much the same as your "Career Center" building. Anyways, our team functions as an extra curricular activity who happens to work out of CAPS. We do our recruitment through having members from each school put up posters and our PR team keeps track of each schools respective "activity night" where the clubs for the school run a booth to showcase their club. I suggest that you get in contact with either members from each school or each administration and ask if you can put on demonstration nights (or even STEM assemblies if you can pull that off with some other choice clubs). Basically what I'm saying is that your Career Center is just your meeting place; the local schools should be where you're drawing from.

If you need further assistance, you can PM me here or email me at CalvinTran01@yahoo.com.

[Tom Line]

We are from an Academy that I believe originally had 5 different high schools participating. Some have fallen by the wayside and some have teams that we've started.

The trick is to go TO the school. Lunch hour works best - and demonstrate. Go to their freshman orientation (most schools have it) and set up a demonstration area. Let them drive the robot if possible. In every case - get names, emails, and phone numbers. Follow up with them. Have them come to team events if you can.

It's all about follow up. The hardest part is getting started, but once you get a core group of kids in a given school, it's a bit like hitting critical mass. Those kids will encourage others to join, and your job will be much easier.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

I agree with Tom, you need to go to the school(s) and demo. There is always some kind of intro for incoming eighth graders, parent's nights, club displays nights etc. You have an advantage since the center is already working close with the schools, you can just tag along when they make their presentations.

[Jon Stratis]

Our situation isn't exactly the same, but it's not too dissimilar. We're a part of the school, but have an off-site build space. It's a private school, and as a result draws from a huge number of middle schools in the area.

We do a few things to help with recruitment, though. To recruit freshmen, we try to get into local middle schools for demos, prioritizing them based on where enrollment typically comes from (you're center can probably give you some idea on the demographics behind their enrollment). We work with the school to push out a letter to all families of incoming freshmen (in the April-May time frame). This letter explains the program, directs them to our website, and invites them to our 2-week summer camp. This usually gets 3-4 freshmen to the camp.

We also rely on current members to recruit their friends and classmates. This usually helps us get another 3-4 sophomores or juniors to the summer camp each year.

The main aim of the summer camp is pretty simple: student excitement and retention. We aren't trying to rebuild a robot or anything like that... we try to find fun stuff the team can do, like build a Rube Goldberg machine (I'll be posting a video of it as soon as I remember to pull it off my phone!) or have a mousetrap car competition. Our activities are oriented around engineering and include a heavy portion of training - we want the students to use most of our tools and equipment during the summer program to help take some of the "fear" out of it.

We typically retain most, if not all, of the students that show up to the summer camp.