So now that we have the forum...

[ChrisH]

Originally posted by sanddrag
I believe this is right but don't plan a wedding based on it. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The SCRRF (Southern California Regional Robotics Forum) will give $2000 per season to your team if you mentor a rookie team at a nearby school. You have to provide the team you are mentoring with a part time engineer and get them set up with a basic chassis and drive train. This sounds like a good idea but I think this would put a real drag on our own team. I just don't think we have the resources or time to mentor a rookie team.

Actually it's Kliener, Perkins, Caufield & Byers that are putting up the money. Right now it's an experiment for California (or maybe West Coast) teams only. This is because while CA has more teams competing than any other state, we also have one of the lowest participation rates of any state. Probably because something like 12% of the high school students in the entire country live here. This was announced at the San Jose regional.

For those of you in the right area, you will be able to mentor up to two teams for the grant. (That's $2K EACH or up to $4K.) Last time I talked to Jason Morrella, he said they were working to define just what would be required of a mentor team. Once they figured that out they would get the word out on how to apply etc.

As for mentoring a team, actually most teams could probably do this. We typically have one of our adults as the primary contact for our mentee teams. This person talks with the adults on the other team and helps them decide on how they want to set things up. They don't need to know all of the answers, they just have to know who on your team has the answer to the question at hand.

We also invite mentee teams to our early brainstorming meetings. But not to the ones where we pick our operational concept, they need to do that for themselves. Besides we might want to keep that a secret for a while.

Technical support is provided on an as needed basis. The team we mentored this year was very strong electrically, but needed help with things like picking gear ratios and getting better traction. I spent many hours on the phone with their head engineer, but the time also helped me think about issues our team was dealing with. Besides, it just so happened that he was a friend from college.

One thing we stressed was that "If you can move and the kids are having a good time, you are successful" To be honest alot of it is just handholding and providing visibility of things that will come up later. It is very hard to imagine what things will be like at a major competition if you haven't been to one.