Starting a team

[KMeyers]

We are an FRC team that is considering starting a FLL team at a local elementary school. Should we be working on this now, or should we wait until the fall to start organizing it?

[cadandcookies]

In almost all cases your team and the team you start will benefit from starting sooner rather than later. What exactly you do, however, depends on what kind of team you intend to start (I apologize that this post probably includes a lot of information that you may not expect, want, or need, but once I started writing about FLL it was really difficult to stop. It's such a great program).

If you read nothing else in this post, the answer is: start early. How exactly you start is up to you.

If your team is planning on actively running the team/has an eye for expanding FLL programs in your area, you might want to consider what essentially amounts to a "rental" model-- you provide kits and a field table to teams, and they supply the adults and students (with maybe a couple of students from your team helping). In this case, you probably want to find funding for the kit and build the table as soon as you have space to store them. This requires up-front investment and effort on your part, but means that your area FLL programs can continue as individual teams and students graduate.

If your team wants to drum up interest and help a group of students and adults start a team at your elementary school, with the school or the team paying for their own kit, then it would be a good idea to identify the adults who will be responsible for the team and the members of your team who will be an active part of helping the team start (if those are two different groups). This is nice because it means your team gets the experience but the funding and material resources don't have to come for the team.

If you want to start the team explicitly for the younger siblings of students on your team, then you probably want to pursue a more integrated approach-- bringing in the parents of the students for whom you are starting the team and the older siblings to the project.

The only case that you shouldn't start now is if you are absolutely sure that you can't get students or parents interested until the season starts, or if your team has other pressing matters to attend to.

On the whole, you aren't going to lose anything by starting earlier. It is more difficult to recruit students at the end of the school year, but if you can get the team meeting through the summer and building a sense of teamwork and doing core values activities, the team will benefit from it. FLL is a different beast than FRC, however, and it's important to remember that-- most elementary school kids do multiple activities and may or may not actually want to be on the team. Hooking them on FIRST is a matter of patience and finding out what they are interested in-- some love the project and some love the robot. It's important to remember that FLL is even more of a "learning experience" than FRC-- many students come into FRC and high school pretty hard set on their preconceived notions of robotics. FLL kids are significantly more malleable, so it's important to expose them to as much as you can at least in the beginning, and then let them solidify into their roles. Most importantly though it to make sure the kids are having fun. It's really easy as a mentor to get way too intense about FLL. There's a reason that there are almost no awards in FLL for robot performace though-- unlike FRC, where "it's not really about the robot" (but it kinda also is), FLL truly is about the team and core values. Never lose sight of that.

My team (2220) "runs" ~25 FLL and 10 FTC teams with a combination of these approaches. We have a number of kits available as a community resource that neighborhood teams can check out and return to us at the end of the season as well as a number of teams that our students and mentors are more directly involved in. Building an FLL and FTC/VEX feeder program is one of the best things you can do for the long-term sustainability of your team-- it's a hard challenge at times, but it is completely worth it, both for the individuals on your team and the team as a whole. I've personally been a part of a team-associated FLL team and helped to run/mentor six of them as a student on the team. It's a great experience.

I hope that didn't run too long...

[Bill_B]

Make sure that everyone involved is tuned into the youth protection aspect of FIRST that gets underway on the first of May. It applies to all FIRST programs but there are significant aspects to your case especially with regard to requirements for coaches. The earlier your organizing effort starts the better it will be for everyone.

[rsisk]

Some things to consider

1. Registration opens May 5. Starting this year, the number you get is permanent, so if you want a low number, register early
2. Challenge comes out in September. So between now and Sept, you would be working on basics. So be sure to get a Mindstorm to use for learning the basics.
3. If this is a school based team, will you have time and place to meet with students before school starts again?

For our FLL team, we are registering in May, meeting every two weeks until challenge is released. During that time we will probably work on programming and sensors.