[FTC]: How do you find new FTC team members?

[Chris is me]

Speaking as a former FTCer for two years (one where I had to start my own team, finding a whopping 1 teammate), I have a bit of experience for this one!

One thing I would suggest is the private school kid organizing a spot at a club fair, or making it a school sanctioned club. Play the animation for this year at an assembly, or just go around to science classes and start talking. You're bound to grab a few people. Plus now you have "veterans" to teach the "rookies" programming and building.

Associating with an admittedly far away FRC team can't hurt. Tag along with them when they do demos, doing some recruiting while you're helping them spread the word about science and technology is a great idea.

Getting other home school kids is a good idea, as it gives them more opportunities to do extracurriculars and interact socially than they otherwise would have. (mentioning this can't hurt your Inspire chances ) I'm not sure how to best do that, other than running newspaper ads or contacting various media sources (FRC teams seem to be good at that).

Good luck.

[Rick TYler]

Some random suggestions:

Tap into your local home-school network. Let them know you are looking for people. Around here all the home-schoolers seem to know each other -- it's a tight group. About 25% of our team are home schoolers.

Go to a local school and talk to career education and/or science teachers. Half our students go to a single high school where we made friends with the AP Physics teacher.

If there aren't any other FTC teams in your area, check around to see if there are any VRC teams. Some areas are dense with one or another (British Columbia is all VEX, Oregon is FTC, Washington is both -- it depends on where you are). It might be easier to tap into a really active VRC community than being the only FTC team in town.

And the #1 time-proven method -- FORCE each of your three members to bring two new people to a meeting where you are building or testing a robot. ALL of our team's growth (from five students to 40) was from word of mouth and friends bringing friends.

We are also a community club (an Explorer Post) that is not affiliated with any particular school. We draw from six schools and a bunch of home schoolers.

[ttldomination]

Hm...the general advice would be to publicize your team in school and ultimately get more members, but your situation is different...so my suggestions would be...

1. Try to get some friends involved. For the past 3 years, I've done all that I can to get my friends involved in robotics in general, and almost all of them have been a great asset to the team.

2. Make your team public. Post an ad in a community news paper and say that you're looking to pick up some new members. But the response to this might be a little high...but it's worth a try.

3. And definitely look into the schools that you guys attend. You don't have to start up an entire program, but see if you can host a couple presentations and get some kids interested. The presentations will be a bonus for INSPIRE as well.