Curriculum for training students?

[ehochstein]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

If you want to chat, our team would be willing to share some details from our summer and fall programs. We're local too, so sitting down and talking through it might be the easiest way!

Teams in Minnesota need to do this more. Aside from the Dunwoody training sessions, I also help run weekly training sessions for both 2470 and 3081 in Bloomington. I would be willing to sit down and talk about my successes and failures on my teams as well. I know this past season I attended team round-tables where a few mentors from the southwest metro-area would get together and talk about this sort of stuff. It is nice to talk to other mentors/teams who have gone through the same problems you are having. Also you get to meet some pretty awesome people

On that note Jon has a pretty cool program over at Visitation and they build amazing robots year after year I'm sure he would have TONS of great advice for you.

[Jon Stratis]

Evan - What do you think about trying to get together a meeting of team leadership (both student and mentor) from some of the stronger teams in the area to talk about this issue (probably sometime after States)? I'm sure I could convince my team to host such a gathering (we're moving into our new STEM center build space on Saturday, we'd love to show it off!), and we could focus less on what each of our teams does to train new students up (although we should still share that info), and more on how we get that information out to other teams. Do we put together a website dedicated to training methods? Do we divide up a list of local teams so we can each get in touch with some of them directly? The MN Splash event is a great way to reach a lot of teams in a short period of time, but it comes fairly late in the fall and doesn't have any hands-on building experience.

[ehochstein]

I think that is a great idea Jon! I'll email you later today with thoughts/ideas for this.

Evan

[rsilverstein]

You should look into Team 1717's curriculum. They have a full 4-year education plan which culminates in FRC for the seniors.

A great example of integrating FIRST within the actual school's academics.

http://www.dpengineering.org/academy/plan/four_year2

[GilaMonsterAlex]

Why not start an off-season project?

We always meet in the end of summer/early fall and work on a robotics project. We use this time to try out new things, and to teach our new students about building a robot. I would say it works. We started with a half new team this year, and they learned a lot.

This year, we started a t-shirt launcher robot. We didn't finish it, but we will continue that project this fall.

If you have the spare parts, then why not come up with something fun? Nothing teaches you how to build a robot, than to build a robot.