Recruiting Students to Teams with "non-Standard" Locations

[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.