Team recruitment techniques?

[AtarashiiSekai]

Hey all!

Since our team consistently has the problem of all the members graduating at one time and not having enough new member to fill the void, we constantly have problems finding people who might be interested in our club and who like to put the time and dedication in to make a great robot

What kinds of techniques and things have you done to recruit new members and get more people interested in robotics?

Thanks all!

[zachrobo1]

Are you part of a high school? If you are, here is some relevant information. Usually we demo our competition robots at our 8th grade open house, letting kids drive our FTC robots and watch our FRC robots. If you have the resources, you could also build an outreach bot and bring it to football and basketball games. Our T-shirt launching robot we built was an awesome crowd-pleaser, and anything else that could interact with the crowd would be as well.

[AtarashiiSekai]

Originally Posted by zachrobo1

Are you part of a high school? If you are, here is some relevant information. Usually we demo our competition robots at our 8th grade open house, letting kids drive our FTC robots and watch our FRC robots. If you have the resources, you could also build an outreach bot and bring it to football and basketball games. Our T-shirt launching robot we built was an awesome crowd-pleaser, and anything else that could interact with the crowd would be as well.

I have since graduated, but yes, our team is part of a high school.

These all seem like awesome ideas. How successful are they, do you think?

[theCADguy]

Instead of building a robot specifically for outreach, Team 20 just uses robots from past years for demos.

[Seth Mallory]

The student sitting at the computer next to me is bleaching his hair. This is the first step of the red hair dye process that most of the students on the team do each year. One of the benefits is that all of the students on campus know about the robotics team. When the team was small the rest of the students would ask about the red hair. That helped introduce the team to the rest of the school.

[zachrobo1]

Originally Posted by AtarashiiSekai

I have since graduated, but yes, our team is part of a high school.

These all seem like awesome ideas. How successful are they, do you think?

Well, when we demo'd it at the Georgia state FTC championship, a guy talked to us about potentially using it at University of Tennessee basketball games!

Also, at the FLL qualifier we hosted, we were shooting t-shirts and some of the kids got a little too crazy, so we had to stop.. whoops...

And this is our cannon, by the way..

[cadandcookies]

The best advice I can give you is to invest in your community-- start a feeder FTC or FLL team, or help an existing one. High school sports have little league teams, and a larger amount of programs for younger students helps build your team towards sustainable growth. Plus, kids coming out of FTC, VEX, or FLL competitions already used to some of the concepts of competitive robotics-- making them better team members once they're in FRC.

A tree needs roots to grow large and strong-- FRC teams are no different, however they choose to put down roots.

[DDSLoan96]

We bring our robot to a lot of events around the town like homecoming, parades, the mall. It also helps when you have a principal that wears the robotics team tshirt at peprally and does an alley oop with our rebound rumble robot passing the ball to him

Link to video since it will be asked for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IC_-...ature=youtu.be