Looking for Resources for Beginners

[Jon Stratis]

For a truly cohesive team, i would stay away from "required reading materials" - When a student joins a team, the last thing they want to do is sit in a corner reading a design book just so they can understand what everyone else is saying.

What we did on the Robettes in the past has really worked out well, and has naturally grown each year. Our first year, we started off at kickoff, and had a heck of a time bringing everyone up to speed. The second year, we spent 3 Saturday mornings going over the different engineering disciplines (Mechanical, Electrical, and Programming), with small projects designed to teach them something about the discipline and to get them familiar with the terminology. Finally this year we expanded out into a whole summer/fall program, meeting once a week and working on projects. The mechanical team built some shifting transmissions, which our team hadn't done before. The electrical team explored some sensors and then decided to create an LED sign for the pits (If you're at the Kansas City or Minneapolis regionals, stop by and check it out!), and the programming team wrote a pretty intelligent and rather elegant autonomous mode for last years robot, and then went on to work on a scouting application. The summer and fall were low pressure situations, where the team could spend the time to educate all of the team members, and as a result we've noticed great things during the build season so far.

I know it's a little late to go back and do something in the fall for the team, but i would still encourage you to spend some time working with the new members to bring them up to speed, instead of just pointing them to some resources to read.