Recruitment

[Owen Busler]

My team ran into an interesting problem last year. We went to every freshmen science class and gave a little 4 minute speech. This yielded outstanding results. Over 100 kids showed up to our "hey are you interested in robotics?" meeting after school in September. After that about 60 showed up to our build site for "freshmen orientation to robotics" Now, on an average night we would have 20 or so kids in our work space, maybe 40 at max if some outreach people are also working. But at one time we had close to 80 people in our workshop and it was crowded.

When you have that many people in a small space it becomes dangerous to use tools, which we weren't doing that first day. But once we started to have build meetings in October, there was an extreme excess of kids. With limited space, and people to train freshmen, there were quite a few people just sitting around doing nothing. By late November, it became more of a social gathering rather than a build meeting. Eventually some of the kids who just sat around stopped coming but i felt bad because it was just impossible to accommodate everyone.

This year we are thinking of doing a little less recruitment so we get kids who really want to do it. Now this is kinda against FIRST ideas because our goal is to inspire new people, but we cant possible support a 100 person team.