2014 help for third year team

[jds2001]

I realize that some of you are still in the 2013 season, but our season is over and I'm firmly in 2014 mode now

TL;DR: We’re an alternative high school for at-risk students, and I’d like some organizational help for the team in 2014.

I’m writing to ask for some help. I'm likely to take over (for 2014) as the lead non-teacher mentor of the team, and while I do have this year’s experience behind me, and think that I can do this, I need some help as to a few items.

First, we’re a bit of a non-traditional high school. We’re an alternative school for at-risk students that haven’t been able to succeed for whatever reason in a traditional high school environment. A lot of our students are fresh immigrants from China (many with under a year in this country, and a lot with limited English proficiency - communication in Mandarin is easier for them). This can create communication challenges occasionally, as my only language is English. Our admission criteria are 17-21 year olds that can graduate by age 21, and have a minimum of 10 high school credits.

Therefore, here more than most other schools, I feel that the robotics program can make a positive impact on the lives of these kids, but we have to be careful at the same time - because of the background that many of our students have, they can get discouraged rather easily. Therefore, while I feel that the program needs structure, enforcing a structure is challenging because I don’t want the students to feel discouraged and leave the program - that would be one of the worst outcomes possible. The makeup of our school also means that it’s small - only around 500 students in total. Because of the admission requirements, it’s mostly a 2 year program, therefore we don’t get the advantage of building a pipeline that most teams get - kids come in as freshman, and continue with the program until senior year.

That presents another problem of the lack of seniority on the team. With students there for only two years, the turnover rate for the team (we were a second year team this year, going to be a third year team in 2014) is high, so building an experienced team is somewhat tricky (all of the experience in the long term I think is going to come from the teacher/mentor side of things).

There’s also the challenge that we’re a NYC public school. Not only that, we share the building with 2 other schools (a middle school and another high school). Therefore, access to the building is difficult because we have to have a school safety officer there at all times while there’s anyone in the building, and getting them to stay after 7PM on any given day is a challenge. As most people know, that’s not enough time during build season to get a good robot built and tested.

Now that I’ve been through what we don’t have, what we do have is good sponsorship (from my employer), so money, while a concern, shouldn’t be that much of a concern. We also have a teacher that’s committed and technical, and serves as a translator when needed. For as small of a team as we have, we’ve got a decent shop going on (we’re not a huge school like where I went to high school all those years ago that had a complete industrial arts program, nor would there be the space - I went to high school in St. Louis, where space is plentiful! In NYC, not so much...)

We competed in the NYC regionals, and we didn’t place last . That being said, we didn’t do much better, either. We had a risky design that didn’t really pay off. Scouting was an issue for us (not that it turned out to be an issue with our performance, but still...), mostly because of a lack of preparation.

What I found during the build season was that our structure, while it existed, wasn’t being followed really. We had one programmer (out of a team of 5), for example, who graduated this year. Not only that, being the only programmer, he was the only one that knew the controls well, so the only driver. Imagine my heart sinking when he came down with a stomach virus on Friday (fortunately, he was only out one match, then was fine). He’s left the team with nothing, really.

The good thing is that I have the code from this year, so if all else fails, we’ll at least have that next year (and Java isn’t incredibly difficult to teach, and the WPILib examples are pretty good and what most of our code is based on). I’d like to see other teams code to see what they’ve done too, so that I can incorporate some of that.

Being a programming guy myself, I’d like to see more discipline around that, including things like version control with git on github, and things like that. But maybe I’m expecting too much of high school kids?

Secondly, we have a shortage of CAD expertise - shortage meaning zero. I’m willing to learn myself and to teach, but what should I do? We’re drawing things by hand, and doing rapid prototyping (like out of wood) to make sure that they work and fit together. I feel that this could be more efficiently done via CAD, but I’m a newbie myself, and no one on the team knows anything either.

I guess that the question for the CD community is what can a team like ours do in order to be more competitive, and what organizational strategies do you think would work with these kids? FIRST is something that I strongly believe can not only get these kids to graduate, but to pursue STEM careers. I only wish I had something like this in high school!