Archi-medes!

[Tonya Scott 476]

Do to outstanding mentoring and awesome Gracious Professionalism--we can expect younger teams to be strong and look really good.

What used to take our teams 3 or 4 years to "get"---they "get it" their 1st year now!

(We had a short "intro to FIRST" meeting in June; an all day training session in September called "Team Summit" that included a variety of 45 min. workshops (the conferences at nationals were my idea a few years ago) so we do the same thing at home. Then we had a full day kit-bot build session on kickoff day. All 24 rookies left with rolling, functioning kit bot frames. And a better understanding of the kit components. Then they spent 6 weeks perfecting it! Now that is mentoring. We are planning on having an adult only mentor/teacher retreat in June to get to know each other, share best practices, and build the relationships between teams. We have a group called OKlahoma Robotics--and hospitality and gracious professionalism is expected and practiced among the adults!)

Not to mention how awesome the kit of parts has gotten. Rookies don't know how easy they have it!

Our 1st year (2000) we were like "HUH" about everything. We went to the Lone Star regional for our very first event--we didn't even know to bring a cart--we were carrying our bot everywhere! Then we decided to go to Nationals that year---we improved on a lot of things, raised $30,000 in a month, and won the National Rookie All Star.

But I'm telling you--the old way of looking at veterans first during scouting---we can't do that anymore. The young teams are looking GOOD!

Keep up the awesome mentoring!!

Keep sharing the scouting info too!

One of you techy youngsters needs to create a data base including a photo of the robots to put on our IPODS, PALMs, cell phones, lap tops etc ! That way when we click on our data, we can pull up a pic of the robot!