Training for the upcoming underclassmen?

[Dan Larochelle]

Trinity high school and intelitek (team #40) used Vex this year to train both upper and underclassmen. For our Aim High brainstorming, we made 6 miniFRC robots (1/3 scale) for this years's game and competed them against each other. We documented our experience in a video you can download at www.intelitekdownloads.com/MiniFRC.

We will be presenting what we learned from this experience to the FIRST community in the "Using Vex to Supercharge your FRC Team" conference at the Championship. We used a beta version of inteliek's new REC curriculum to train the students in robotics before this year's kickoff. The curriculum assumes the student has no prior knowledge of robotics and each activity builds on the previously learned materials. The students used the curriculum to become familiar with the Vex hardware and the easyC software prior to the 2006 kickoff.

The MiniFRC project was a great success for our team. It really got the underclassmen more involved. The lessons we learned in the MiniFRC project directly affected our big FRC robot's design. When we started building the big robot, the underclassmen kept iterating the MiniFRC designs and competing them against each other to further increase their knowledge. This was the most productive year for my underclassmen in the 13 years I have been a mentor. I think I learned just as much as they did.