MassFIRST

[Ken Leung]

The first thing to do is to have the team leader meeting. It is very important that you have a face to face meeting with the dedicated FIRST-a-holics around your area. It makes everything more real, and you can get through a lot of discussion in a meeting. You can figure out how much everyone is willing to do.

And be realistic. All of you have a robotics team, and competition is starting in January. So chances are, you will be really busy during 6 weeks and build period. So focus your discussion for offseason/preseason first.

Having a remote kickoff is fairly easy to do, if you just want to watch the broadcast together. What we do here is we arrange it with NASA Ames and get a feed coming to San Jose State University (not just the internet broadcast), and we setup a room so that about 4 team representative per team can gather together and watch the game on a big projection screen. Then if you want to have scoring objects at the remote kickoff, you will have to arrange it with the regional director around your area to set something up.

As far as workshops goes, you can talk about what kind of workshop you want to have, but most important of all you have to find the teachers for team. The team leaders, teachers, engineers are great resources for the workshops. Have a panel of discussion about how to run a team, or get a programming workshop going, or a drive train workshop. The limiting factor will be how many teachers you will find. When the first workshop happens, chances are the teachers teaching the workshops will get their team to come attend the workshop, so you should get a pretty good turn out. You just have to find a venue, like a local university, with enough class rooms and parking. Just figure out what equipment the teachers will need, such as projectors, and you got yourself a workshop.

Also, as I remember correctly Erin is having an off season competition next year. This will be a great way to see how strong of a group you will have. Have all the teams interested in MassFIRST volunteer at that competition. It will make the competition much more friendlier.


Finally, the most important of all, take advantage of this chance to get all the contact information in one place. Set up an e-mail list so that you can send e-mail to the community. Don't spam the list too much, or else people won't want to stay on the list.

Good Luck!