Young Leaders in FIRST

[Jonathan Norris]

From my 3 years of experience on team 610 I feel that because of our somewhat unique structure our greatest challenge, and i feel as our greatest achievement, is the passing and growth of knowledge from year-to-year. We pride our selves on being a student run team, this being our distinct choice, but this brings great challenges with the turnover of leadership and knowledge every year. Every season brings a new team leader(s), and every year they approach the position differently with varying levels of success. Even though we are mainly student run we have three main teacher mentors and a retired electrical engineer who have been with us since the beginnings of FIRST in Canada. These mentors help bring stability in years where the leadership seems to struggle at times, and have gotten more involved in developing the Lego and VEX teams at our school recently.

Because the main leader changes every year and as with every team the graduating students move on. The majority of the technical knowledge usually resides in the minds of the the seniors, because of this we feel one of the most important tasks every year is for the older students to teach new students everything, from machining to electrical to programing to mechanical systems to design. And history has shown us that years where we put the focus on teaching the team is more successful. Because of this we have had many up and down years. The beginning of the team (2001-2003) was very successful, winning a chairman's award and a regional championship. However, once robotics started to get more popular at our school and after all this success the decision was made to make robotics more exclusive. Basically restricting the influx of new students every year. This lead to less success in the 2004 season and what could be described as a down year in 2005, not to say we weren't competitive just not at the level we strive to be. A sort of changing of the guard happened last year with new leadership, the focus was shifted to getting new students involved and on the sharing of all the technical knowledge. This resulted in the most grade 9 (freshmen) students joining our team and created a great new core of robotics students. The change in philosophy brought much more success to the team last year and a more competitive robot. This year we are retaining that philosophy and will continue to push the bar higher every year.

We have learned that every year is going to be different, with different student leaders leading the team. But the growth and advancement of the program is as important as single season success.

[Kyle Love]

Check out the Tkat Handbook from 01-02. I will try to see if we can't upload some of the more up-to-date handbooks.

More Handbooks are found here.

Some random tips:

• Get everyone involved
• Utilize each kids individual talents
• Make the meetings FUN!
• Don't let the team break into little cliques
• Create a "team leader" system with roles such as, team lead, mechanical lead, software lead, marketing lead and PR lead.

...more to come later...