How does your team handle season wrap-up?

[Ben Martin]

What does your team do when the competition season is over?
-Make a video?
-Have a banquet/picnic/event?
-Give awards to team members?
-Prep for off-season competitions?
-Continue to work on the robot?
-Do meetings continue, or do you take a break?

[Maldridge422]

Our team has an annual banquet for inaugurating our new officers and wrapping up the season. Every year we give out "superlatives" to team members. Each team member gets a unique award, most of which are rather silly. My personal favorite from last year was the "Brownie/Taco Award" given to a freshman who was known for his...interesting dietary choices.

[CalTran]

Originally Posted by Ben Martin

What does your team do when the competition season is over?
-Make a video?
-Have a banquet/picnic/event?
-Give awards to team members?
-Prep for off-season competitions?
-Continue to work on the robot?
-Do meetings continue, or do you take a break?

End of season video: [✓]
Banquet: [✓]
Awards: [✓]
Prep for Off-Season: ...maybe...
Work on robot: ...er...
Meeting Break: [✓]

So perhaps we don't do quite as much in off season as we should. Our mentors need a well deserved break. Our last meeting, not including banquet, usually involves some sort of post-mortem of our events.
Our banquets are your typical end of season event. Our families all come and we have a great time. We'll pay for catering, we'll play music and have a season highlights video, we'll give out participation awards, special awards to heads of departments, senior awards, and mentor awards. Then, the seniors get their time to talk to the team and describe their time on the team as well as any parting advice they have (T.T I don't want to leave!). Then, the season is a wrap!

[treffk]

We try to have a banquet to send off the seniors and give out letters and pins. Although this year its been a bit difficult for the students to find a date that will work for everyone.

Although the season never stops for us. Team parents/mentors have decided to try to have 1 fundraising event a month. For May we actually have 2 the annual Spring Craft Fair and a Culver's night. For June we have our annual Garage/Rummage Sale. July we are looking into working a concessions booth at a local amusement park.

During the school year the team meets 2 nights a week, with the exception of build season. While school is out we will probably meet about twice a month, with more frequent meetings leading up to fundraising events.

[nicholsjj]

Sleep and give up mass consumptions of mountain dew for 8 months, and.. start working on VRC slowly.

[protoserge]

What does your team do when the competition season is over?
-Make a video? Yes
-Have a banquet/picnic/event? Yes
-Give awards to team members? Yes
-Prep for off-season competitions? At some point
-Continue to work on the robot? Yes
-Do meetings continue, or do you take a break? Break for a week or two and have a debrief

Outreach events and planning are up soon!

I am taking a cRIO for the summer and plan on doing some fun projects with it. Typically one of the C&C mentors will take the robot to his shop to play around with control loops as well.

The season never actually "ends" for us. We've just begun 2013-2014

[Clem1640]

We change gears at season wrap-up, We:

1. perform a post-mortem and identify desired process changes;
2. identify summer projects and their leads;
3. prepare for off-season competitions;
4. set a summer training program (CAD, Welding,...); and
5. ramp down our meeting frequency to 1 per week

[Koko Ed]

We have a picnic in June at Charlotte Beach which in Rochester can be a hit or miss proposition. Sometimes it's perfect outside and other times it's cold, damp and stormy.

[Jonathan Ryan]

We have a get together and hand out some team awards, tell some stories, show some videos. My son, who is an honorary member of the team as he is in 6th grade, created the dessert portion of the meal. Yes, those are chocolate T-Rex skeletons at the bottom left and right.

[dubiousSwain]

Originally Posted by Maldridge422

Our team has an annual banquet for inaugurating our new officers and wrapping up the season. Every year we give out "superlatives" to team members. Each team member gets a unique award, most of which are rather silly. My personal favorite from last year was the "Brownie/Taco Award" given to a freshman who was known for his...interesting dietary choices.

Brownie tacos you say?
brownie tacos are good.

[TikiTech]

Aloha!

Normally we will take the week off after the world competition to recover from the trip.

We still have Botball and underwater ROV competitions coming up. So we keep meeting twice a week after the recovery break.

Then it’s time for our annual Ho’ike (Hawaiian celebration).

This annual outreach celebration showcases the students achievements to the public and consists of:
Campus tours for the public to the various areas we use for robotics.
At these locations the public will have time for hands on interactive demonstrations of the robots.
As well as the students will share their experiences with the visitors and answer questions.
This normally consists of a tour of the metals tech lab to showcase the FIRST robot, agriculture area to demonstrate the underwater ROV and various classrooms for the Vex, Skills USA, Botball and Science Olympiad.

After the tours we end our celebration in the cafeteria where we have lots of great food with a silent auction.
During that time we will have various student made videos showcasing the different competitions and year end reflections.

Then it is on to the student achievement awards. We have created many awards from certificates of achievement, personalized trophies, and perpetual awards to honor the students with. The perpetual plaques have the students names added and are kept in our trophy case for the years to come.
Also throughout the awards ceremony we have each senior come up and give their parting speech. (tears time!)

Before school ends we will have a big team meeting to reflect on the year together.
Say our good byes to the seniors and start planning on the summer fundraisers and outreach events.

The Tiki Techs have many things planned and our program never really ends…

[peirvine]

For 2175, we:
-Make a video? Yes - sometimes we spend a little too much time on this and not enough time on our robot...
-Have a banquet/picnic/event? Yes, we usually have it in the Great Hall of our school, with slideshows, videos, music, food, etc.
-Give awards to team members? Yes, we hand out certificates much similar to Maldridge422's team. We also recognize seniors and mentors for their work.
-Prep for off-season competitions? Our season never ends, last year, we had our wrap up banquet on the Saturday of Championships (we didn't make it down). This year, since we made it to Championships and the Minnesota State Championships, and we applied to IRI, the work never stops...
-Continue to work on the robot? Yes, we have to, an unofficial motto of our team is: "If its not broken, fix it"
-Do meetings continue, or do you take a break? No. Its robots all the time. When we are not working in the shop we are planing demos or fundraising. Its a full time job...

[theawesome1730]

What's a wrap up? We never stop. After competitions are over we gear up for our summer camps and summer fundraising and off seasons. Then in the fall we host a robotics competition called CowTown ThrowDown at our high school. If anyone is interested shoot me a PM and I can get you info

[spydan]

What does your team do when the competition season is over?
-Make a video? No, but we should (I should get on that)
-Have a banquet/picnic/event? We all watch the world champs together, have food, and play Xbox
-Give awards to team members? No
-Prep for off-season competitions? Yes, if we are attending any
-Continue to work on the robot? Sometimes we build off season robots (last year we built a t-shirt cannon) and we fix the current robot if we are going to off-season events
-Do meetings continue, or do you take a break? We never end the meetings! Although, we do take a week or two off then have meetings less frequently

Also, this year we are hosting a summer camp for learning on using Lego Mindstorm kits (we use the last year's FLL field)

[fiona.crush1011]

Team CRUSH 1011 always has a fun pool party at the end of each year to celebrate our team's success!
This year we are also having a Sponsor Appreciation Night in which we invite our sponsors and do a demo for them. We will also honor our sponsors with different awards. We will have a video of the entire year and show this as well!
For our team members we make them certificates with clever titles pertaining to what each member did (ex. one kid who milled all the time got the "It's Miller Time Award, etc)
We will be improving upon this year's robot as well as making a practice robot to try to get some of the younger kids more practice! We also have tons of presentations/fundraisers planned!
Basically this year we are going to take the summer to improve upon our team as a whole! Everything from robot designing to awards writing to presentations/fundraising and even an off season event we hold every year in Tucson!