FRC Blogged - The Other Shoe, Surveys, and Please be Safe!

[Hallry]

Taken from the FRC Blog, 5/20/13: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...please-be-safe

The Other Shoe, Surveys, and Please be Safe!

Blog Date: Monday, May 20, 2013 - 15:22
The Other Shoe



The Old Shoe by George Hodan

Some folks are waiting for the other shoe to drop* from my last blog. There’s no other shoe.

Surveys

We have two important FRC surveys open at this time, which I hope everyone will participate in. We really do mine these surveys for information useful in making FRC better.

The Kit of Parts Survey is open until June 14th. We’re asking a Student Team Captain and Technical Mentor, one of each from each team, to complete the survey. Tell us what you think of the Kit of Parts, please.

The Post Season Survey is open until May 27th. We’re asking all students and mentors to fill this out, the more the better. This survey is very broad ranging, and for the first time, at least in recent years, we’re asking teams what they look for in FRC games. Consider this set of questions another experiment. We may not have asked the right questions, or the answers we get back may not give us a clear picture of the things you like to see, but we thought we’d give it a try.

Please be Safe!

The official 2013 FRC Season is over, but unofficial off-season events are just getting revved up. The bad news is I’ve already heard of a few folks getting hurt at these events. Luckily, none of the injuries were too serious. In the off-season, teams may be trying out some new mechanisms they didn’t get a chance to develop during the regular season. Or, they may be trying out some new team members, who they also didn’t get a chance to develop during the regular season. In any case, you should be as safety conscious at your events off-season as you were at your events in-season. Make sure you practice handling your robot, carrying it and getting it down from the pyramid if you are able to climb, before you get to the event, with the people who will actually be doing it. We’re sending notes to our FTAs, many of whom support off-season events, to remind them to keep an eye on safety. Don’t let your summer, or worse, be ruined by a few moments of inattention. (Special shout-out to Colleen Shaver, who provided very useful insight on this section of the blog.)

I’ll blog again soon.

Frank

*Interesting, to me, explanation of where this idiom comes from: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wait_f...r_shoe_to_drop. Not necessarily a true explanation, but interesting, and lacking any evidence to the contrary at this time, I’m going with it.