Recruiting

[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

[gobeavs]

Our robot from Raising the Bar (2 years ago) hung on a basketball hoop rim during one of our pep rallies. That seemed pretty effective for getting a "wow, that's pretty cool" from everyone - don't know how many recruits we got from it though. Our team also helped at a local FLL event and were able to show our robot off. Hopefully that will bring some recruits down the road.

[anna~marie]

one organization:
FLL
get involved

[Beth Sweet]

We are also losing half of our team because of the graduation issue this year (fortunately it sounds like one or two may be coming back as mentors!)

For things like the lunch, can that be done at the beginning of next school year? Our mentor crew is out of town already for this summer.

While the FLL and elementary/middle schools are good, does anyone have any more immediate recruitment methods?

[RoboMadi]

Originally Posted by Beth Sweet

We are also losing half of our team because of the graduation issue this year (fortunately it sounds like one or two may be coming back as mentors!)

For things like the lunch, can that be done at the beginning of next school year? Our mentor crew is out of town already for this summer.

While the FLL and elementary/middle schools are good, does anyone have any more immediate recruitment methods?

That what happened to us last year. When we started we were only 8 people, but we recruited more and when the season started we were 30+

Here are some ways:
-have a car wash/donation event. While you guys are washing cars, ask one of your people to introduce them to your robot and let them drive it. We got a lot of home schoolers and freshmen because of this.
-Home GAMES!!.. take your robot to the home games and do like a shenanigan with it. Like the time we chased our principal around the track with or 2005 robot, during the half time. We also built a Basketball Robot, just for the sake of entertainment and using it to recruit more people.
-Morning announcements in school. DO IT!.... its slow but it will help
-After School event or during class event. this year before we shipped out the robot, we took it in the senior hallway and shot balls out of it. Whoever catches a ball gets a candy....

Thats just some of the stuff we did. We also go to the Museums and Fairs with our robot and recruit mentors and students from other schools etc.

let me know if you have any questions..

[santosh]

We are currently losing 8 seniors and from interest forms from the upcoming Freshmen Magnet class of 2009, we will be gaining 55 people. This will bring the number up to 149 people.

We do A LOT of outreach events and many kids from these outreach events transfer into our school district to take part in our club.
We have this thing called wildcat daze at our school where all the clubs and organizations have a booth. At this booth we always have a couple of FRC bots, a couple of FLL bots, and a VEX bot or two. This always attracts people. We also work with many local FLL teams. By getting to know these kids and mentors of a lot of teams on a personal level, we can recruit a lot of them into the next level.
We also mentor a few teams and the kids on these teams that are moving up to high school are ither coming to our school to join up and a few are going to their schools to try and get teams started there.

[lukevanoort]

We chronically have these sort of problems, our team varies from small to smaller, or larger, with a lot of people standing around talking. I'm personally out to build a T-Shirt cannon robot with our six years of pneumatics hardware and some random drive parts. (Triple rapid-fire launchers baby, two compressors a piece)

[Zoheb N]

Originally Posted by anna~marie

one organization:
FLL
get involved

We do FLL every year, but FLL is more of a long term recruitment and many kids that don't continue with robotics forget how it was.. so are there any other ways to get them excited again about robotics..

[kateisgreat145]

we do demos during our lunch periods. also were big on female involvement (chick power), so we did a women in science and engineering day presentation. we had female engineers form our corporate sponsor come and talk about there experience in science and tech. also another first student and i talked about how kick $@#$@#$@# first is. i can personally say that we got a HUGE amount of response.