How much does your school's general population care about your team?

[jimv]

My team is two schools (which are rivals in other sports) so I can't speak about the other school, but my school gives a little recognition to us in the form of news videos including us and announcements when we do well (however they don't mention people from the other school which I find kind of funny). Otherwise, people don't know what we do but tend to be curious until they learn it isn't Battlebots, ask about joining, or say they tried to join but couldn't find the lab.

[abbymarie]

We are minimally cared about at our school. We got a send off for Championships, but they grouped us with all of the other fine arts activities. No one was told about our regional, or about how to cheer us on at Championships.

[planetbrilliant]

It's a work in progress.
Our school still doesn't care that much or acknowledge us, but we're working on it.
We did get to launch t-shirts at a pep rally earlier this year, that was awesome.

[kayelia42]

One of the things that frustrated me the most this past year coming back from regionals is that members of our team weren't willing to represent the team. I sit with a bunch of people on our team during lunch, and when one of the other members wore his team shirt the day we got back from regionals I heard the comment "Why is he wearing that, I want to be done with robotics." I was a freshman on our team, so it was really disheartening to hear these older students that I looked up to badmouthing another teammate in general, let alone for being proud of our team.

[NShep98]

My teams pulls from 3 or 4 different schools (plus likely a discontinuing school-based team starting 2017). Unfortunately, I am not from the school where most of our members are from. At my school, knowledge of our team is limited to our principal from knowing team members that have since graduated, and a handful of teachers and friends of mine.

We are allowed to have segments on the morning news if we ask (getting kids to listen is another story), but otherwise the school is not really obligated to do anything for us, which is one of the downsides to not being affiliated with a school.

[jess_17]

The majority of students at my team's school don't know that we have a robotics team. The school used to put competition dates on the calendar and in homeroom announcements, but they don't even do that anymore. They focus primarily on sports teams and the arts.

When mentioning robotics to my teachers, they always bring up Battlebots or are surprised that we have a team. One asked me if we build the underwater robots.

However, my team is very fortunate to be able to work in such a large space. Our school recently bought some property containing an armory (which they will later tear down to build a pool) and we have been given 4 rooms and a shed to work in, which is a lot of space for our small 14-member team. We also have a large gym floor in the center (used for practice day 2015) which we can use when none of the sports teams are there.

We don't often talk about robotics because, at least in my experience, most people will lose interest. It's hard to understand all of the excitement at competitions and having a time limit of six weeks to build a robot unless you have firsthand experience.

[scott.smith]

In our school, our section of the tech wing has 2 trophy cases with all of our awards, and defining pieces of previous robots. Most people know that there is a robotics club, and they might have announcements if we win a regional or do well at champs. Honestly, I talked to some non-stem people, and they thought that we were all huge losers. They also think that mentors do all of the work(They don't). One of our team members posted in 2010 about pretty much the same thing, and it hasn't changed since then. So we have some school culture change to do.

[Elizabeth Lowe]

This is a fascinating discussion--obviously it's timeless since it's been going on at least since 2010!

If you're anywhere near Michigan, you may want to attend our ROBO-CON Festival on July 23, 2016 in Lapeer, Michigan. This year we're putting together a roundtable discussion involving educators who are also mentors, and encouraging other teachers, administrators and school board members to come out to hear how robotics team involvement affects students academically.

This idea came about after a conversation with an alternative ed teacher who started coaching a rookie team this year (and they did fabulous!). We talked about how motivating it is for the students to compete the robot they built. I want educators to hear from their peers about what a difference robotics makes, and I hope this is a springboard to schools welcoming and encouraging their robotics teams.

We haven't yet set a time for the roundtable discussion, but when we do, we'll post it on the event website at MiRoboCon.com.

[BrendanM]

I'm not actually a student at the school that hosts us (technically the school doesn't host us anyway) but as far as I've been told, the board and administrators as well as some teachers are actually trying to prevent people from finding out about the robotics team.

[SpaceBiz]

Originally Posted by BrendanM

I'm not actually a student at the school that hosts us (technically the school doesn't host us anyway) but as far as I've been told, the board and administrators as well as some teachers are actually trying to prevent people from finding out about the robotics team.

I don't see a reason why they would want to do this. Unless the program makes the school look bad, (there are some clubs at my school that do hurt the school image) most schools want students to get involved. And I am unaware of any robotics teams that hurt their school's image.

[Zac Schofield]

From what I've seen at my school, The faculty likes our FRC Team and what it does. They help us out by paying for district event registration and we used to have a shop in our Tech Center. On the whole, the administration generally likes us and supports us. However, At the end of the 2014 season, we surrendered our shop to the school so they could have a "science room" with working gas and water for more science experiments (chemistry, physical science, etc...). It's been two years and the room is technically a science room, and teachers do use it, but with no water or gas, just a few tables in the middle of the room so students cant actually do hands-on experiments in that room. So now our shop is setup in an unused room in the middle school (Which is way smaller than our old shop.). In addition to that, they don't really announce how we did at events like other sports teams.

As for the student aspect of this question, last year there were a bunch of rookies joining the team (We had about 80 kids total, which was about 10% of the school population) and robotics was "the club to join" for the first time I've ever seen. However due to the frustrations of last season and especially this season, our population has thinned to about 60 kids, only half of which are "active" members. This year, the rowing team and other sports were more popular among students, so there as not a whole lot of interest from the students even when we demoed our robot at school assemblies.

Overall, I'd say that school interest has fluctuated considerably over the past few years, but all we can do is try our best and hope that we get new rookies who are hardworking and love robots!

[qscgy]

Outside of the STEM magnet program, most people don't know that we exist. The sports teams get mentioned on the morning announcements whenever they have a game, win or lose, but we never get any recognition, aside from occasional recruiting messages, which all clubs do.

[GeeTwo]

We have pretty decent awareness and support. Anyone who comes in on the east side of the school or heads back to the football stadium knows about us, because we have the largest, best marked trailer of any school organization. We bring the t-shirt launcher to most of the home football games, which is a great recruiting resource and buys lots of good will from both students and administration. We have even had a number of teachers skip teaching on Bayou Friday to play the web feed in class. It also helps that the robotics team usually has at least one member in common with just about every other team and organization on campus.

[cpapplefamily]

Our general population is the least of our worries. Our school is our biggest hurdle. We are currently trying to find an off sight location and become independent.

[xjschwen]

We are luckier than most teams.

Our school district recently (2 years ago) idled the middle school due to declining enrollment. We have full run of 3 class rooms. We have them divided as a metal room with band saws and general chassis build area.

We have a second room referred to as the the wood room... We do most of our wood work and game elements here.

The third room is our software room... It is also the FTC team's main build room.

We also have full run of the library during build season because it has lots of space to setup a half field when needed.

I say our administration fully supports our team with this amount of space to work in. They have even purchased new cad workstations for the team.

However, our team struggles to get more than 10-12 students, which is about 4% of our student population in the grades 9-12. We are currently without faculty member of the school system being on the mentor crew.

We are working hard now to up participation and recruiting new members is a top priority for the team for the first time in a while.