What kind of activities do you partake in to prepare students for build season?

[John Sabath]

Our regular meetings start next week, and we're brainstorming ways to keep people interested until the true excitement begins.

[EricH]

Build a robot (doesn't have to be for a game, but a working drivetrain is handy to have lying around for defense practice).
Offseason events.
Train new members.
Do an engineering challenge--try a punkin chunkin event or some similar idea.
Strategy concepts--use old games and develop a strategy to win.

Of course, this is just a short list of options--some teams don't do any, some do all or most.

[F22Rapture]

Pit design. We're a 2nd (going on 3rd) year team and ours last year was abysmal.

Building a new robot cart and driverstation.

Building a new robot chassis to get some extra driver training.

Once we do that, hopefully, I'll have the rest of the programming team a rundown on Java and have them re-write the code to get an idea of how everything works.

[Walter Deitzler]

3397:

• Prepares the robot for the Cow Town Throw Down, an offseason event
• Is building a new cart
• Training our rookies through FTC

Hope this helps!!!

[MrBasse]

We are building a NECA (National Electric Cart Assoc.) race car for competition in April and May. It gives kids a good engineering challenge without the ridiculous time constraint that can make FIRST so stress free and fun.

Also, kids are preparing everything for our local off season event, WMRI.

Once they learn how to work together then we'll start talking about robots...