Starting 20 new teams this year. Need help.

[atlas]

Hey guys,
Team 1817 here.

FIRST wants us to start 20 new teams in the west Texas, Lubbock area. Including Amarillo and El Paso. AND they are starting a new Lubbock Regional this year. Everything is pretty much set to do this, we have students ready to go. But no mentors.

We have been recruiting college students at Texas Tech University to be mentors, but we need more. If anyone out in that area would be interested in being a mentor for a rookie team, or know of anyone (FIRST alumni/mentors/professional engineers) that would be, please let us know.

We can be reached at:
team1817@gmail.com

[Dkt01]

You may want to post to the Facebook alumni group. Many members are college students and I'm sure there are students in that area.

[ebarker]

Y'all have some serious work cut out for you guys. At major risk of self promotion.......

Here is what we did here in Georgia the past year or so. At the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year Georgia had 18 FRC rookie teams on the taxiway getting ready to take off. Pretty scary.

About 6 rookies got partnered with a veteran team or went solo. The other 12 attended workshops, hand on build sessions, and other support activities at the Kell Robotics Innovation Center, aka the 'IC'. We didn't take occupancy of the 'IC' until November 1st and held our 1st training sessions in December.

Mentors taught about 1/3 of the material and our team students about 2/3.

1) You need to get a good information kit out to the HR department of companies in the area and ask for mentors.

2) Recruit students to teach essentials of whatever topic is needed. Create a cascade of mentorship. Adult mentors-->student mentors-->rookies... You might not have a choice.

3) We do training sessions by appointment. We quickly evaluate the rookies and quickly adapt the training session to their need, the ability, and where we are on the calendar. Some groups will come in regularly and train over months. Some have had to come in and do a crash build. Trainers have to walk a fine line and manage time and resources and try to help the rookies get a toehold and get excited about what they are doing.

4) Find adult mentors to keep in contact and monitor all rookies. During the build season at the end of week two some MUST do a site visit with the team. I can tell you horror stories about what rookie teams have been doing that have not properly been monitored.

5) Call a mentor / coach meeting. For example, we recently held the GeorgiaFIRST MAC meeting, the Mentor Advisory Conference. We held it at a conference center at Kennesaw State University. After opening the meeting ask the crowd for concerns and questions and wrote them on the board. We had a dozen or so and I facilitated a very interactive guided discussion of the crowd.. Great interaction between rookie and veteran mentors. Very productive format. It is very important to train mentors. They need to understand the schedule of the year, how they can help, and frankly will need some guidance to help them get into a mode where they are working with high school students that have not so much knowledge.

6) This past weekend we had training happen at two sites. In the morning we were at the GeorgiaFIRST full size official FRC field. It is hosted at the Walton Robotics site. There we had rookies tryout driving this pasts years robots that were on the field. Then we went to lunch and then to the Kell 'IC'. All afternoon was basic training. We covered the competition, pit setup, judging, programming, mechanical design, and more. We have a permanent 'pit' setup at the IC. Between experiencing the field at the Walton site, the pit at the 'IC', and a lot of training, these rookies are making some progress. These rookies will be in the 'IC' for many more sessions.

7) Train, Train, Train. We have been training rookies all this past summer and will be doing more from here to the competition. Training will be uneven across teams. If you can figure out how to even it up, go for it. If you can create opportunities to train teams, people will take advantage of that 12 months a year.

8) Training needs to get them excited early. If on the 1st day a rookie can create a Java linetracker project, have them add two joysticks and tankdrive, download it and go, that will fire them up. Understanding will come later.

9) Information push to the teams - a) Chiefdelphi is a good forum for getting quick answers to problems, not too good for quickly getting to organized information about 'standard topics'. b) We created the www.the-innovation-center.org website to help teams get fast answers to training and supplier questions. It is NOT a forum but hopefully an evolving catalog of easy to access useful information. You are not going to have time to answer the same supplier and training questions for 20 teams, over and over. We hope the 'IC' website will be useful. We will see. If you know of information that should be there, let me know.

10) Find some robots to help do the training with. Get some teams to collaborate. Fortunately we have a fleet of 7 cRio based systems so we can have multiple parallel breakout groups. 'Smaller class' size = ( number of students ) / robot.

Creating a mentor training/conference will take the resources of several mentors and some promotion and coordination from your Regional Director.

If the rest of the country is anything like Georgia, getting the word out about FIRST isn't the big issue anymore. Responding to the growth is the real challenge.

[Coach Norm]

I would recommend getting in touch with the Oklahoma regional director. They started with a huge number of rookie teams a few years ago. I know they have kit bot build on kickoff.

Team 2468 will do some mentoring through Skype and Facetime if you would like. We are planning on attending the Lubbock Regional as our first registration.

Please DM message if you are interested in some preseason calls or online conferences.

Norman

[jbsmithtx]

Know a few people from up in the area (our team is from Fort Worth). Will try to persuade them to get involved, which many of them already seem to be doing. Several very smart engineers up there which would make great mentors.

Also looking forward to the Lubbock regional. Hope to raise enough funds to attend it this year! Brand new and always will be exciting!

[PayneTrain]

Only 20? What a lightweight. But seriously, I guess everything is bigger in Texas, including aspirations for FRC.

I know VirginiaFIRST and other organizations try to recruit universities to help with the program, and in turn advertise how much the University loves FIRST. I assume there will be a kickoff event in Lubbock, Texas at TTU. If you could secure some large, general purpose work area for all of the rookies to meet at the University until school is back in session, you could train in weekends before kickoff, and help with kitbot demonstrations and large fundamentals of strategy and design sessions in this area weekends after kickoff until students come back to move in. I imagine a combination of a lecture hall and common area for discussion/hand work could provide a large enough space to hold 20 teams. After that I guess you could assign alumni mentors interested in building a resume to teams that request one, and maybe try to do telementoring with some of the bigger teams in the state, even if they are far away.

Good luck guys. I can't really wrap my head around 20 rookie teams in one metro area just coming into existence.

[BackInCalgary]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

Only 20? What a lightweight. But seriously, I guess everything is bigger in Texas, including aspirations for FRC.

Good luck guys. I can't really wrap my head around 20 rookie teams in one metro area just coming into existence.

The West Canada regional is basically that, before this year there were 2 teams west of Ontario, now we're having a regional. A lot of work by 4334.

[nuggetsyl]

Why are you starting 20 teams? Why stretch your team so thin? And where is the money coming from?

[ebarker]

Originally Posted by nuggetsyl

Why are you starting 20 teams?

At least in some geographical areas, you don't go start 20 teams. They pop up like mushrooms overnight. It isn't a choice of the veteran team.

The issue is helping them get off to a good start and then keeping them in good enough shape to stay sustainable and not die off.

[Jon Stratis]

Try reaching out to the Minnesota regional director. We grew by leaps and bounds a few years ago. If I remember right, there was 1 team 7 years ago, then around 20 teams 6 years ago, then over 40, then over 100 in the state. We're up over 150, and I think this year we might finally have more FRC teams than high school boys hockey teams in the state (we missed the mark by only a couple last year!) It really was explosive growth, and somehow the mentorship in the area managed to almost keep pace with the need. But then again, I've only met a couple of teams who have said they didn't want more mentors

[nuggetsyl]

Originally Posted by ebarker

At least in some geographical areas, you don't go start 20 teams. They pop up like mushrooms overnight. It isn't a choice of the veteran team.

The issue is helping them get off to a good start and then keeping them in good enough shape to stay sustainable and not die off.

That is the problem. If you don't lay a good foundation what was the point. The goal should be to start a team that thrives has money that is not nasa and starts mentoring other teams in 3 to 4 years not hoping they do not die off.

[Easy2Cme]

Hey guys...
I've got a question about my Vex robot, but this site is totally confusing me! Sorry to post in an unrelated thread, but can someone please tell me how to post my own question thread? Thank you to whoever helps!

[PVCpirate]

try clicking on forums from the portal and scrolling down to the VEX section under "other". you should be able to post a question from there.

[JesseK]

Ed Barker nailed it! That's what we did in DC for 2009 and it worked. Follow up the support with competition-day support and you're golden.

Longer-term, find companies that are willing to invest employee time into the 20 teams. Setup recruitment demonstrations at manufacturing plants and software/design tech firms. Make sure the lead of each team knows that the most important thing to remember about the first year is to make it to the second year (and have some fun).

[nuggetsyl]

I am just a firm believer Organic Growth vs Rapid Growth.