Building a (FIRST) Robotics Program in the Community

[craigbutcher]

As a mentor for a rookie team, I am thinking of what we need to do to build for next year and into the future. FIRST has tremendous potential to help our school and community lead its kids in worthwhile educational directions. I would like to see a forum where there is discussion specifically showing how successful teams built their programs... what worked, what did not.

If this is already a forum I could not find it.

Thank you.

Craig Butcher

[cbolin]

Hi Craig,
Our students came back from the Nationals with lots of excitement. It was infectious in a very good way. Here is what we are going to do to affect our community.

1. We are going to meet at our plant (I am a technical trainer here at Bosch) the 1st and 3rd Saturday each month during the year (including the summer). We have invited teachers (from 2 high schools), mentors, students and parents to come out during this time. We will teach C programming in our computer lab, build VEX robots to solve lots of complex problems, practice writing autonomous programming for this years robot and teach machining.

2. We will teach the students how to run clubs and help to organize/sponsor an after school robot club at each high school...run by our students and supervised/guidance by teachers/mentors.

3. We will publish a monthly newsletter on the 4th Saturday of the month describing what we have done in that particular month. We will send this to all sponsors, school board members, teachers, parents, etc. The goal is to keep reminding those in our community of our constant commitment to our students.

4. We will put on demonstrations throughout the year showing off this years robot and playing our VEX bots against each other. Similar to the VEX venue, we can allow members of the public to drive our VEX bots against each other...giving out our team buttons or something.

That's the general plan....

Regards,
ChuckB