FIRST Champs Invite - How do you manage growth of your FRC Program?

[Mr. B.]

Hi All,

Thanks for the posts and your questions! I wanted to take a quick moment to answer a few of the questions posted.

Our parent/mentor/alumni community is quite extensive. The mentors for our JV MORT Beta team are all MORT 11 Alumni who are now in industry and are now giving back to our program. It really allows our first year students with the opportunity to engage in the FRC experience and ask all types of questions of these mentors (career/FRC/MORT, etc.) It's a safe environment vs. being placed with upper classmen where they might opt to be quiet and not ask their questions in front of their peers for fear of being wrong. Between the 2 teams we have 40+ mentors, our core parent support team is in the 25+ range and our alumni that aren't involved with 193 help out when able with our 11 team.

In regards to fundraising, we have strong district & sponsor support for our teams. We also have two major team fundraisers (NJ State FLL Tournament and MAR District Event) that help us raise funds through concession sales. We have a highly dedicated team that their only focus for MORT is food concessions for these events and they do an awesome job for us. Between the two events, we are able to bring in over $25,000 for our teams.

As for separation of the two teams. We have three shops, plus other classrooms (Programming/CAD, etc.) we use at our school. Space at times can be a challenge due to our team size, but we work through those challenges and for the most part have a smooth operation. 193 works out of our Wood Shop and 11 works out of our Robotics Lab, we have a metal shop that is used by both teams throughout the build season and our teams work through scheduling the use of the tools without issue. Our two teams work independently of each other, but do offer assistance throughout the year as needed. Both teams work well together and understand that as a whole we are the MORT family who just happens to have two teams that build two separate robots.

I know one question I get asked often is why did we opt for FRC over FTC for our freshman students. We talked about the pros/cons of each and we felt that our program is FRC focused and the sooner we got our students engaged in the FRC world the better. We are looking to get our Robotics II courses engaged in FTC in 2014-2015 but that will be done during the academic day and will be separate from our FRC program.

If you're attending FIRST Champs next week, feel free to swing by 11's or 193's pit to talk more about what we do and hopefully some of you can share your experiences with me and offer some new ideas or successes you may have!

Stay well,

Dave (Mr. B.)