Frequency of Offseason Meetings

[Yan Wang]

Our first meeting as a team is next week, so that got me thinking about how often teams met in the offseason between the time after summer vacation and before the actual season started? Our team will hopefully meet once a week till January.

[Katie Reynolds]

Team 93 meets regularily on Thursdays until kick-off (unless it's a holiday or something!) Sometimes we meet more than once a week if we have fundraisers going on or if we have to get ready for a big demonstration (like Appleton's Octoberfest!)

- Katie

[Nathan Pell]

Team 1083 meets weeky until the kick off as well. Just thought we would let you know

[sanddrag]

Team 696 met 2 or 3 times over the summer. We have had two meetings during the school year so far as well. We have two demonstration events coming up within the next two weeks. We have one small fundraiser coming up in about a week.

We will meet once or twice if needed per week for about 30 minutes until the end of October and then we will meet 4 hours on Saturdays and 2 hours on one weeknight every week until kickoff.

After kickoff we will meet like every day for many hours.

[Frank(Aflak)]

we just had our first meeting, although all the veterans (all six of us) have been talking FIRST since school started (we are all good friends, and there are only six of us . . . right now we have to whip a buncha fresh meat into robot-building shape by january. A tough task. We also need to raise six large. hmmm.

[Elgin Clock]

Finally, a post that is here for a reason!!! lol

If this were like one of those questions on a personality test, then I would have to anwer, "seldom to none".

I think that a team who is involved with any type of activity should obviously meet more frequently when it is "crunch time", (aka the six weeks in FIRST), but not neglect meeting when there is "nothing" to do. (HA)

I am one of the people who think that there is never an off season. All year long teams should be meeting regulaly and discussing things like, what worked last year?, what didn't?, what do we want to do this year?, what do we not want to do?.

I realise that this is a hard ting to do for a school based team that have school aged members that just want to enjoy their time between april and january, in the case of FIRST, or (more importantly?) June, July and August, but to be sucessful, you can not rest for any signifigant amount of time if you expect to do good in the future.

[SaxMan701]

Heh...you guys seem so...organized. We've had one meeting since Championship, and that was for PARC. There's a rumor that there will be one or two meetings before Duel on the Deleware, but that didn't happen last year, so I doubt it will happen. Usually we have 2 or 3 meetings before kickoff. No regular schedule or anything.

Oh, and usually people drop by the shop whenever it is convenient to get permission slips for Duel and Ramp Riot.

[Kevin A]

My team has been meeting once a week since school started. We have 7 or so lego league schools to mentor and that sorta stuff. I have personally been at robotics way to much (4 or 5 times a week) getting ready for cal games,working on the darpa car, and getting parts to make part of the sophomores float.

[Alaina]

Organization? Team meetings? What??/?

Team 814 has only met once this year, and that was to introduce the game to new members and hand out permission slips for Cal Games...
I believe our next meeting will be for fundraising. Like we have a set time, though.



We hardly even need to have "meetings" anyway. We are all friends and hang out with eachother all the time at school. We just talk about what we have to do at lunch, break, through email, etc.

[Rich Kressly]

Our team is in the same homeroom every morning. That's when we hand out/collect fundraiser and other info. Our Marketing/PR people meet twice a week and usually work a third day just to keep up. We mentor four LEGO teams on Tues, Wed, and Thurs from 4-6 pm until December and will be training new animators on Wed and Thurs beginning in October. In addition we will begin training new CAD/Inventor people within the next few weeks and will also start work on a drive system prototype for 2004. Then there's regularly scheduled meetings with officers, scouting/strategy people, parent orientation/meetings, and preparing our 2003 bot for fall comps and demos.

[Wayne C.]

Team 25 meets every Wednesday for a few hours with team committees meeting otherwise on their own schedules. Our senior students are running training meetings for things like scouting robots, team history, brainstorming and such right now. We also recently had a well attended parent evening meeting to get the ball rolling for Final Bin Bash (10/25- be there!).

Overall, we have at least one event and one fund raising activity every month of the year- including the summer.

All are welcome to come out to our meetings. Feel free to drop by.

BTW- we instated a set of team requirements this year including mandatory community service, mandatory parental support and mandatory academic performance. So for most of the members the team is even more ingrained in their lives these days (Thanks Cybersonics for the ideas and advice!)
Our school recently recognized team 25 on par with an athletic team and we now have a head coach (me) and will shortly be adding 1-2 assistant coaches on staff.


WC

[soezgg]

Yeah I wish my team were more active over the summer, I think alot more work would get done during the real season if we took the chance to work on machines and learn about robot stuff during the off season.

[Tytus Gerrish]

every tuesday and the car washes

[Jen Peters]

Team #470 - Alpha Omega Robotics meets every Wednesday during off season (May - December), with the exception of a few weeks off. Our team is always busy working on something so we have to meet every week in order to get things done.