Demos--What do you do?

[Billfred]

So now the group has heard about how to do demos in very little space.

I've been curious about this one for a while--what do you do and talk about during a demo? My team is looking to get into the demo business, and I'm just curious as to how others fill up their 12.93 (or longer) minutes of time.

And in a similar vein, how long are your demos?

[Bcahn836]

It all depends on who is the audience for the demo. Our last demo we did to the science board at the local college. And we were there for a few hours, we showed them our end of the year video, answered alot of technical questions about the robot and team structure, most of them were college professors and such. Then in a very small cramped space we showed most of the moving parts. We finished up by letting the audience come up and look at the robot with a few of our team members there to answer any questions. However another demo that we did was to 5th through 8th graders in a slightly larger area. There we showed our 10 min movie and drove the robot around, and answered questions some difficult ones too from 5th graders lol and then towards the end we let a few of them operate the arm systems under close supervision.

So I guess the point is it all depends on the goal of the demo informational, sponsorship, community outreach, and also the audience and other limitations whether it be time or space.

[kjohnson]

Originally Posted by Bcahn836

It all depends on who is the audience for the demo.

Thats very true. We have been doing a lot of demos at conferences held by our spopnsors. A few weeks ago we took both our 2004 and 2005 robots to the LRIG Southeast conference. We were able to demonstrate and show videos/powerpoints of both competitions.

Then you get to the shorter demos at school. We always get a time limit on our demos but I'm usually running them so the limit never sticks. For our school board we showed a 10 minute powerpoint and had the robot in the hallway that they could look at if they wanted. We also did a demo for the whole school during the Academic Awards assembly. We showed a 6 minute powerpoint with the music running through the sound system, did a demonstration of picking tetras from the floor and auto-loader and placing them on the goal on the stage.

It all just depends on your audience and the time that you have to demonstrate everything.

[evelyn1503]

we have been doing demos and we just explan the game the robot and a little of our experinces ... rirmember K.I.S.S

Team 114 has only mainly done demos for younger (K-3rd) kids. Our method is to first just have the bot sit there, while we explain the game/scoring a little bit (we have to make that part simple). After this we usually show what our robot can do that others can't- (crab drive). We then let the kids look up close at the Robot, and we answer questions. This usually consists of them asking "why didn't you just- *insert massivley more complex method here*?" And, as our Finale, we show off any other bot we brought for that demo.

[Kyle Love]

Yesterday, we did a demo for around 45 minutes, but that was for energetic little kids! Most of the time demo's for people who know nothing about FIRST will be around 5-10 minutes of talking and 10+ minutes of driving around and asking questions. (not always that long/short) It depends mainly on how much space, time, and the type of people that are there. Now, we have the kids, like myself, do a lot of the talking. I find it fun to talk about it to people, although sometimes I'm guilty of telling them technical stuff they don't want to know .

Yesterday, we used some of our extra t-shirts as door prizes. It was fun showing the robot off for little kids and then asking them questions about the presentation, they were really excited to get a shirt!

Always mention interesting facts about your team(ie community involvement, special features that make your team great etc.). With the younger kids mention that they can join a Lego league team, then become a member of a FIRST team when they get a bit older.

-hopefully this made some sense and can help you all out somehow-

-Kyle

[Dorienne]

Just sum up FIRST in about two minutes. Shouldn't be too hard, just talk about the generic idea of FIRST...and then let them drive the 'bot around and whatnot. Give 'em a hands on experience. Talk to them about what you do with the robot when they're driving it...talk about your robot. We planning on doing a ton of demos when school starts.

Good luck, Billyfred. <3

[Lil' Lavery]

We have all sorts of demos for all sorts of different crowds. Most of our demos are for outreach to the community. For instance, our last one was at our town festival, where we had a booth. In one half of the booth we set up display boards with pictures and whatnot, had our robot, and a jar for donations, and wed talk about FIRST and Team 116. The other half we made a demo vex game which we ran, kind of like the Vex Pit challenge at the championship.
For smaller scale outreach events we dont bring the vex field, but we typically bring at least one display board, and our robot.
For when we talk to engineers and the like we typically explain the FIRST program, its effects on us, and the benefits of being a team. Same with when we talk to school board people. When we talk to students, children, or average joes, we usually end up explaining a bit more about the game and robot than the team itself, as they usually arnt as interested in that, they are just amazed by our bot. If they show interest in the FIRST program, then we explain it a bit more to them.

[EricH]

As many have said, the audience determines the demo. Our last two (the ones referred to in the reduced-space demos thread) were strictly timed. The one in for the church congregation had a time limit originally, but then it was shortened to 5 minutes because somone else also wanted to address the crowd. We drove a bit, capped a couple tetras, had students talk about the game, the robot, and how we do things, and then capped two more at the same time to close out. For another audience, we would do things differently.

[Pat Fairbank]

We just did a couple of days worth of demos for K-6 kids at the local 'Space Day'. We only have about 10 minutes per group, so we only briefly talk about the competition and the game (mentioning only the main challenge for each year) before demoing the 'bots. We have very limited space, so we just stack tetras on a single goal (note that it doesn't take much to impress people) and fire soccer balls into the crowd with our 2002 'bot, challenging the kids to try and catch them.

[petek]

I attended a team demonstration recently and came away wondering: "how do you get the audience more involved?"

This team was giving a demo/talk in a gymnasium, explaining what they do to a fairly large group. They were doing the typical floor show - running their robot around in front of the assembled crowd - while a spokesman talked and answered questions. Though they did an good job explaining what FIRST and their team are about and answering questions, there wasn't a whole lot of interaction.

With people assembled in an audience, there is really only one channel of communication open at a time, and most people feel inhibited from asking questions in front of so many people. I wonder if teams would be better off setting up a few "pit stalls" where people can meet team members and talk one-on-one. Kind of like scouting and meeting judges in the pits at regionals. This opens up so many more communication channels and gives more team members opportunities to talk.

With pit stalls, you could have one (or more) for FRC, one for VEX and one for FLL, all going at the same time. This could even simulate a little of the activity and excitement of a regional or FLL pit area. Has anyone done this, and if so, do you think it worked?

What other ways do we have to really reach people?

[Bcahn836]

Originally Posted by petek

I attended a team demonstration recently and came away wondering: "how do you get the audience more involved?"

This team was giving a demo/talk in a gymnasium, explaining what they do to a fairly large group. They were doing the typical floor show - running their robot around in front of the assembled crowd - while a spokesman talked and answered questions. Though they did an good job explaining what FIRST and their team are about and answering questions, there wasn't a whole lot of interaction.

With people assembled in an audience, there is really only one channel of communication open at a time, and most people feel inhibited from asking questions in front of so many people. I wonder if teams would be better off setting up a few "pit stalls" where people can meet team members and talk one-on-one. Kind of like scouting and meeting judges in the pits at regionals. This opens up so many more communication channels and gives more team members opportunities to talk.

With pit stalls, you could have one (or more) for FRC, one for VEX and one for FLL, all going at the same time. This could even simulate a little of the activity and excitement of a regional or FLL pit area. Has anyone done this, and if so, do you think it worked?

What other ways do we have to really reach people?

Usually after the demo we bring out all previous years robots set them out and let the audiance come up and take a closer look at what we do. we also have students and mentors to answer or explain anything.

[MChapman]

We demo all over our towns. We go to our air museum, carnavals, parades, librarys, and schools. Depending on our audiance we talk or show different things. We always show our robot an tell them about the game an what it can do. We also bring robots from past years, and yearbooks, an anyhting we might have worth showing! We give anyone knowledge about FIRST if they want to know, and make sure we spread the word of FIRST. We defently get our audiances involved, from as young as they come to adults. Demos are always fun w/ my team, an we love them.

[phrontist]

The craziest demo we have ever done, by far, was running our robot under it's own power in a 5k "fun run". It made it about 2k before running out of juice, at which point it went on a dolly and was pushed the rest of the way. We had to have quite a few people on all sides of it, presidential motorcade style, to insure the saftey of other runners. We also kept to the back where the crowd was really thin. I think we proved how durable the thing was...

[Barry Bonzack]

I have a list of things and can go on for a while on this subject... but in the interest of keeping it short, I'll tell you how I start a FIRST speech and let you go from there according to your audience and what best will fit your team.

Open by explaining these aren't "i-robots" or "terminators" and are not going to attack you in your sleep. Explain that they are also not battling robots. This then leads into explaining Gracious professionalism.

From there you can talk about FIRST in general, the Game, what the regionals are like, how your team did at competition, explaining the robot, a good story about a certain student, impact on the students/school/community, other community involvement... List goes on and on about good things to talk about.