973 Remote Assistance and Mentorship Program (RAMP)

[AdamHeard]

Over the years, 973 has helped a great number of teams informally through direct communication (private messages, instant message, email, etc…) providing everything from basic design advice to design review to fabrication of key parts in a pinch. This was never advertised, so we believe we could reach more teams by doing so.

For the 2014 Season, 973 is pleased to announce the Remote Assistance and Mentorship Program (RAMP). By emailing 973Ramp@gmail.com with your team number in the subject line teams can apply for help by answering some brief questions:

• What kind of help you are looking for.
• how many mentors you have.
• what events you are going to.
• what machines/resources you have in house and at sponsors.
• what communication methods works best for you.

From there, we will do our best to respond and help as many as possible. We are unsure how many people will ask for help, so we will do our best to help everybody, but we will focus our help where we feel it is appropriate. Some rough guidelines explaining our selection process are below

• Teams without mentors will be given #1 priority.

• Teams with simple problems with quick answers will likely get their answers due to the low cost involved on our end.

• We are interested in helping teams that need it, but we also have to balance our own needs. Requests for parts manufacture need to demonstrate a GREAT need, and our own schedule needs to be free enough to allow it. We may reply with recommendations of COTS parts that can solve your problem. It’s very likely we will fabricate parts for teams this year, but it may not be your team. So please do not be upset if this is the case.

• We will not design your robot for you, or give out designs. We will gladly review and recommend changes to your design though.

In the interest of maximizing the amount of people we can help for our efforts, we may respond not with a direct answer, but instead with links or information that pushes you pretty nicely into the direction of your answer. Of course, if further clarification is needed feel free to contact us again.

We are focused on giving quality and actionable advice rather than quantity of advice, so all mentorship provided will be from our Top mentors. If the demand far outpaces our ability to reply, we will unfortunately be unavailable to those that ask. If this is the case, we will put efforts into recruiting other capable teams/mentors to assist for the 2015 season.

We will also be posting a series of videos to help teams with the design process, so if you have any questions or ideas that you’d like covered, please submit them to 973Ramp@gmail.com.