Reaching Critical Mass

[Jon Stratis]

A couple of thoughts for your latest question:

- What you're looking for here is an elevator speech, and it's not necessarily easy to come up with one. In the past, we've sat down with the entire team to work on them, having each student develop their own based on their own experiences, deliver it, and then talk as a team about what the best aspects of each speech is. In general, our elevator speeches start with a summary of FIRST, and then move into our team and history. With this type of speech, you want the most important information in the first 30 seconds, and then you basically keep going more and more in depth for as long as the audience is interested.
- Driving the robot around is the "cool" portion of the new member meeting. Before we do that with our students, we talk about the robot. Basically, pretend the students are judges at a competition, and you need to tell them all about your robot. Have the returning members talk about how it works, what parts they designed and built. That will help get the engineering aspect of the program across. It sounds like the teacher you mentioned missed that connection, and thought you just got a robot and drove it around! Keep in mind, the game is only important as it describes the task you designed the robot for - don't dwell on it! The important thing is the robot itself.
- A speech won't help anyone to truly understand what goes into an FRC team. During our two week long summer camp this year, we held a mousetrap car competition that was essentially a mini build season + competition for the students. It got them doing some actual engineering to solve a fairly simple task, talking about their car and how they designed it, and even experiencing multiple "matches" with breaks in between to fix/improve their cars. At the end, we could tell the 7 rookie members that they just went through their first build season, and that the actual build season was just a more intense version (and when we said that, the returning members said "oh wow, you're right!"). Describing the whole thing here is probably too much, but if you want to know more, message me with your e-mail address and I'll send over a full description plus some of our materials.


Of course, all of this is targeted at the engineering design/build aspect of a team, and we all know that teams are much more than just building a robot. However, I would recommend focusing first on this aspect and your discussion of it. Once that is on solid footing, you can afford to turn some of your attention towards the other aspects of a team, like community outreach.