Recruiting

[StephLee]

The best way everyone will surely post is getting to kids at the middle school or elementary school level. Word of mouth has always been important to our team; getting our friends to join worked decently well last year without any concentrated or organized effort. This year, we need to expand a fair amount (we'll have 9 gaping holes in two years when my class graduates - and right now we're only 13 students with two seniors leaving now ), so I'll be interested in what other responses people give.

[Adam Richards]

Indoctrinate them while they're young and impressionable. Demonstrations to local middle schools are always really helpful, as well as having a freshman teacher show videos of your team at regionals (from SOAP or your team's own recording) to incoming freshmen during the first few days at school. We had one of our freshmen teachers do it this year, and we had students from the Class of 2009 practically flooding our table at Club Rush when they were signing up for clubs at the start of the year.

[Zoheb N]

well we currently take our robot to the day that fresman sign up for clubs so we get some fresman, but we need more upperclassman because all of our freshman do Botball another robotics program.

[spears312]

Were going to try and do a lot of word of mouth this year as well as showing video from our trips to the competitions. We may also try "rolling admissions" so the effect of word of mouth takes further effect.

[Dan Zollman]

Our school has a freshman orientation for freshman and their parents at the end of each summer, and clubs can have tables in the gym to promote themselves. There is also a "club fair" one day in the second or third week of school.

We also put up posters in the hallways to advertise our start-of-the-year informational meeting and have the meeting included in the morning announcements leading up to that day.

We have a small team so we need to do a lot of recruitment next year. Our rookie team hasn't begun to interact with the district's middle schools, so the incoming freshmen will not have heard of our team. Hopefully some more ideas will come up.

[Donut]

We presented our 2005 robot at a club day thing (got lots of people to watch, especially when we tried to cap a gazebo with a chair), but other than that everything has been through word of mouth (this includes everyone trying to drag their friends in, making announcements of club meetings, putting notices on TV if you have them at your school, and putting up fliers for the first few meetings).

We had the best success we've ever had at actually getting people to come initially; between 40-50 people came to our first meeting. Unfortunately, we haven't yet mastered the art of keeping students who come to meetings, so that quickly dropped to probably 15 or 20 kids. It was back up to about 30 by the time build came around though, mainly because we accept any members at any time as long as you are willing to do something (there are some kids who didn't join until the first day of build, yet contributed more than kids who had been there since the first meeting).

Doing some other things to get you recognized at the school work well too; alot of the previous members wore their robotics shirts during school (I currently own 3 shirts from each of the past 3 years, totaling 9 shirts), and we held a LAN party at the school as a fundraiser.

[Zoheb N]

Well the word of mouth really doesn't work too well at my school because it usually gets to one person and that person is like forget it I don't want to pass that on... and signs are usually ignored.... are there any other attractive ways to involve more people

[sheltie234]

Our team mentors 3 Lego League teams and a VEX team. A cool thing about our VEX team, the Cyber Stangs 56, is that they are what we call our 'eighth grade interns.' During the build season, the VEX kids came to our shop and lab several times and tried out the machines and programs, so that when they get to become freshmen, they already know about how our team works and the commitment it takes to be on an FRC team. We have had articles published in our local and school newspapers about Cyber Blue and FIRST. We have Project Lead The Way courses at our school, and the teacher is one of our team sponsors. We also have videos on our morning announcements that try to rope in new members. However, a lot of new members hear about FIRST robotics by our team members.

[Not2B]

Drive the big, scary robot around at lunch. Let people try it out. Tell them YOU built it.

Then... while all the interested people are crowded around, go find the people looking from a distance, and go let them know that they too could build a robot. Something they can learn. Get the people on the edge - who might not even think engineering is something they can do.

OK - I made that up - we have the opposite problem. Money, Space, and Adults for one team, students for 3. But it should work.

[Zoheb N]

has anyone tried a pep rally? if so how did it go? what did you guys do at the pep rally?

[Donut]

Originally Posted by Zoheb N

has anyone tried a pep rally? if so how did it go? what did you guys do at the pep rally?

Soley for the robotics team? No. But we have demonstrated our robot during part of a pep rally before. People have liked it both times we did it, we usually get comments of "how the heck did you guys do that", "that was cool", or things like that. I'm not entirely sure how many people it convinced to join the club, as they've both been done towards the end of the school year.

In 2005 we used our robot to cap a few tetras out on a goal, mainly looking cool because we showed off that we could hoist a tetra 13 feet into the air and drive around with the same ease as when our robot is at the 5 foot normal limit. I wasn't there, but they also used either the 2002 or 2001 robot during its respective year to show off how much their robot could pull, and pulled a cart (don't know if it had wheels on the bottom or not, I'm pretty sure it did) with the entire offensive line of the football team on it. They would have pulled more but didn't have a big enough cart.

Currently a few of us are trying to think of how to create balls the same size as poof balls filled with something (t-shirts or other goodies) to shoot out of this year's robot for pep rallys or football games. It would require no modification of this year's robot, which would make it very simple to do. I just don't know what we'd want to use so that it wouldn't hurt people if it hit them.

[Zoheb N]

Does your school allow you to shoot things that fast at people??? Also t-shirts would be the safest thing