Transition from the First Year

[A Dog IRL]

Hey there!

I'm a soon-to-be alum for 5196 and I have some quick questions that Google couldn't necessarily help me solve. I started the team at my high school this year and the students, mentors, and parents, had a fantastic experience. I really want to continue this next year since I am going to college relatively close and I can mentor the team, along with some friends that helped me start it that are going to college nearby as well. My only issue is that I can't find any resources on how to be a more successful team the second year over the first year.

This year, we did not do very much fundraising. Right now I am working with two other members to create a fundraising "guide" that others on the team can use over the summer to send out to companies and organizations and raise support for our team. Are there any resources specifically for newly made teams about fundraising?

Our robot this year was not nearly up-to-par with much more veteran teams, which is understandable, but the entire team wants to be a known name throughout FRC and FIRST (it was actually quite fun at St. Louis when you walk around and you hear your name being mumbled). What kind of steps should we be taking to ensure that next year, we have a lot more time in build season to practice, as well as have a much better robot?

We are using LabVIEW to program the robot and it has proven quite handy in teaching people the basics, compared to text based programming like C++ or Java (shoutout to 357 for helping us immensely in Archimedes). A mentor and myself programmed the robot this year, and we don't really have anyone stepping up to the plate to learn about LabVIEW. How can we encourage students to want to participate with the programming, as well as other areas of robot design, next year?

Lastly, we aren't really sure what it takes to run a team. The documents and permission slips and other things aren't published on a lot of teams' websites so we don't know what to model ours after. Is there some kind of list of resources we need to provide, such as a team handbook and consent forms (for local machine shops, that kind of thing), online somewhere?

I really want this team to be successful, and I'm sure everyone else on the team wants it to be as well. We're trying to recruit a lot more kids in our school (we're at 15 people on the team right now, more than half of which are freshmen) but we're also running into some stumps. How can we recruit more people, including people who aren't into robotics as much? The main issue for us, I think, is that everyone who hears about a "robotics team" is intimidated and thinks they'll be marked as a nerd or something for joining. That presents a problem because we need strong leaders who might not be super interested in robotics, but could help lead the team, say, financially.

I will probably think of a few more questions, but I'll refrain from adding them to the thread because I don't want to spend too much of someone else's time answering these. Feel free to shoot me a PM and we can talk there, via email, or even on Skype if you want.

Thanks!

[Josh Fox]

There are teams out there who've published guides on how to be successful in FIRST that detail how their programs are run, robot design philosophies, and even things like fundraising and where to order parts. Many resources like this are available through CD or team websites.

Ours is the Team RUSH Toolkit for Success. Check it out, and if you have any specific questions feel free to ask or PM me and I will do my best to answer or put you in contact with someone who can.

PS As a huge Breaking Bad fan, I'm definitely a huge Breaking Bot fan as well! Good luck in the future.

[Jay O'Donnell]

I can answer questions 2 and 5 at least...
For having a better robot and build season in general, the best thing to do is spend more time going over game analysis and design, so that build goes a lot smoother. The biggest thing to remember is build within your resources and don't try to do everything if you know you won't be able to. As for recruiting new members, we send flyers around the school to get interest going, but the more important part is keeping the new students invested during their first few meetings. We participate in a local VEX competition run by WPI and have two teams of freshman with the upperclassmen acting as mentors. Hope that helps!

[AlexD744]

I'm more or less throwing out random thoughts pertaining to the questions you asked, sorry for disorganization.

744 was more or less on the verge of collapse between the 2008 and 2009 seasons. Financial and mentor support was alright, but there were going to be ~3 students left on the team after the seniors graduated. Those students sat down and and made a plan to recruit people. By far the most beneficial thing they did was getting a class period for robotics. It let people experience the team without having to commit a lot of after-school time, in addition to getting elective credit. Another thing they did was get their friends involved by saying, "We go on the most fun trips!" Next season there was ~15-20 students on the team. Fast-forward to this year, the school added a special STEM certificate if you graduate with the correct classes, and we had a record 34 students or about 10% of the student body!

Another thing to help get people excited is to do a trip early in the school year and make the emphasis on having fun. There's at least one off-season in Florida next fall, Panther Prowl. Info found here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=128591

The addition of a class also helped financially. Every year the students get a project to send out the team's sponsor letter to x number of people. Family, friends, businesses, etc. It's a graded assignment, so lots of people get contacted. Keep in mind though that this is an unreliable method, returning different results every year.

There is a fundraising toolkit posted by FIRST, which can be found here: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...aising-toolkit

From our experience, the best fundraising you can do though is to find lasting partnerships in the community. Chances are someone on your team or in your school knows someone who knows someone who works with a company/business that would be willing to support your team. Fundraising is great and important, but in order to be sustainable, you'll want several partnerships with sponsors, and from our experience, most of those have come from personal contacts.

If you have the resources, you could also do mini-projects during the fall to help prepare for build season, get people working on tools, get people used to working in teams, etc. If you don't have the resources, work on getting them so in future years you can do these projects. Regardless, you can train programmers using this years robot.

Lastly, don't get overwhelmed! If it seems like a lot, break things down into smaller bits. You're clearly of to a great start, with a well deserved RAS to prove it! If your teams finds itself in a serious jam come fall, contact the regional director (for South Florida I believe it's Sandra Contreras). This person is there to help the teams and will do what they can to ensure a team doesn't fall apart!

And actually, I almost forgot. Being a college student involved with a team (to a small degree), I want to caution: Be careful being a mentor in college. Everyone takes college differently, and it's ultimately up to you to find what is best for you, but a lot of people can't handle mentoring while in college. The transition from student to mentor is also a tricky thing to navigate. If you search, you'll find plenty of threads on here about this subject that I suggest you read before making the decision to mentor.

tl;dr A lengthy question deserves a lengthy response, right?

[A Dog IRL]

Originally Posted by Josh Fox

Ours is the Team RUSH Toolkit for Success.

PS As a huge Breaking Bad fan, I'm definitely a huge Breaking Bot fan as well! Good luck in the future.

Downloaded now! I will review it tonight when I am feeling better (apparently struck with the St. Louis sickness that's been going around). Thank you!
We might be doing mass shirt trades depending on how many people want them. Shh.

Originally Posted by Jay O'Donnell

I can answer questions 2 and 5 at least...
For having a better robot and build season in general, the best thing to do is spend more time going over game analysis and design, so that build goes a lot smoother. The biggest thing to remember is build within your resources and don't try to do everything if you know you won't be able to. As for recruiting new members, we send flyers around the school to get interest going, but the more important part is keeping the new students invested during their first few meetings. We participate in a local VEX competition run by WPI and have two teams of freshman with the upperclassmen acting as mentors. Hope that helps!

We are definitely going to plan everything out more. We actually spent the entire 6 weeks building the robot and had almost no time to practice driving. Now we realize how much planning beforehand (robot frame and drivetrain) and finalizing a design in the first week really matter. We will try sending flyers out. Thank you!

Originally Posted by AlexD744

By far the most beneficial thing they did was getting a class period for robotics. It let people experience the team without having to commit a lot of after-school time, in addition to getting elective credit.

Long replies are the best! We actually talked to our new club sponsor, the engineering teacher at our school, about turning robotics into a class and he said he will make the senior and junior levels into solely robotics classes! Very excited about that.

Originally Posted by AlexD744

Another thing to help get people excited is to do a trip early in the school year and make the emphasis on having fun. There's at least one off-season in Florida next fall, Panther Prowl. Info found here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=128591

We are planning on attending this with some changes to the robot. Trying to scrape up funds for travel, hotels, and all that stuff so we can have more than two weeks to plan for the trip! c:

Originally Posted by AlexD744

From our experience, the best fundraising you can do though is to find lasting partnerships in the community. Chances are someone on your team or in your school knows someone who knows someone who works with a company/business that would be willing to support your team. Fundraising is great and important, but in order to be sustainable, you'll want several partnerships with sponsors, and from our experience, most of those have come from personal contacts.

Thank you for the link to the toolkit. We are already talking to students and their parents about contacting friends and family that may own businesses. This summer we will be going around to local businesses.

Originally Posted by AlexD744

If you have the resources, you could also do mini-projects during the fall to help prepare for build season, get people working on tools, get people used to working in teams, etc. If you don't have the resources, work on getting them so in future years you can do these projects. Regardless, you can train programmers using this years robot.

We are working on a chassis and swerve drive train this summer to teach people about programming, mechanics, and electronics!

Originally Posted by AlexD744

Lastly, don't get overwhelmed! If it seems like a lot, break things down into smaller bits. You're clearly of to a great start, with a well deserved RAS to prove it! If your teams finds itself in a serious jam come fall, contact the regional director (for South Florida I believe it's Sandra Contreras). This person is there to help the teams and will do what they can to ensure a team doesn't fall apart!

We are actually in contact with Sandra and talking to her a bunch about how to continue. And thank you!

Originally Posted by AlexD744

And actually, I almost forgot. Being a college student involved with a team (to a small degree), I want to caution: Be careful being a mentor in college. Everyone takes college differently, and it's ultimately up to you to find what is best for you, but a lot of people can't handle mentoring while in college. The transition from student to mentor is also a tricky thing to navigate. If you search, you'll find plenty of threads on here about this subject that I suggest you read before making the decision to mentor.

Will take that into account, I'll have to do some more reading later.

Thank you for your response, AlexD744! I'll actually email you/your team sometime soon about perhaps mentoring us through next year!

[Cynette]

In addition to the FIRST Fundraising Toolkit, FIRST has a Mentor Resource page that has links to resource after resource for just about any issue a team can have. http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...ources-library

[who716]

Hey Jake,

Im sure a lot of teams have been in the same spot at some point during there FRC career. after you get a few years under you I believe it gets easier to run and operate the team. But with the drive and enthusiasm you have about this team and program im sure your team will do great in the future. On that note I will share with you some things I have picked up over the years.
Fundraising- As im sure you are aware, FRC is not cheap, so fundraising is a necessity. I know from experience that just mailing a sponsorship letter to companies isn't the best way to grab there attention, What we do that seems to work well is get into groups and go door to door to companies talking about the whole program to them, this really grabs there attention. and often time will donate money just because the students had the guts to go up to the door and knock. Also try to get a table at home shows and similar activities.
Robot build My word of advice in this is don't bite off more then your team can handle. you stated you have a fairly small team. if I was in your position and lets say this game is the same, I would have built a drive train first and got that working completely functional and let the drive team get a feel for the turning the speed and controls right away, then I would build a robot that can do one part of the game extremely well for example I would have built a very very good inbounding robot. this way you could get the robot done fairly soon and get allot of practice driving and learning defense.

Kids interest do a lot of summer activities that cover programming build, electrical, etc.. make it fun for example build a t shirt cannon or a robot that has a chair fastened to it to drive people around, even program your own game.

Recruiting- The BEST way to grab students is to bring them to a competition preferably an offseason event, advertise all over the school free day off of school come see team XXXX compete EVEN DRIVE THE ROBOT! you could even offer lunch to those who come. this worked at our school because many kids jumped on this opportunity to get out of school for the day when the next year come around the kids who were considering joining will stay even some that thought they were doing it for a free day will stay.

I hope this is of good use to you and your team and am glad to offer help any other way, good luck in 2015~!

[Kevin Phan]

Glad to be of assistance you guys at world champs! Anyways, when I try to get people involved in programming I would show them the cool things that have happen in the world of programming. There also has to be an emphasis on that programming is important and needs to be accomplish. It's one of things that separates the strong teams from the average teams. What I make some of the kids on the team do is experiment with creating code that displays stuff on the dashboard, play around with the different sensors in frc and create some sort of challenge for them to attempt. Since I'm a senior and graduating soon and if you need someone to give a hand in programming I'll be willing to help out over the internet since I'm way up in PA. I already have the shirt and hat to be a part of the team.

[A Dog IRL]

Originally Posted by Kevin Phan

Since I'm a senior and graduating soon and if you need someone to give a hand in programming I'll be willing to help out over the internet since I'm way up in PA. I already have the shirt and hat to be a part of the team.

We'll definitely call upon your godly LabVIEW skills someday in the future. A mentor and myself are planning on designing swerve drive with the CIM inside of the wheel over the summer to keep ourselves busy. Apparently programming is a complete monster for that, so perhaps I'll ask you sometime. ^^ I could probably have some freshmen do research on LabVIEW with swerve.. hmm.

As for getting people into programming, I was thinking of hosting little workshop sessions on summer weekends to educate people about the power of LabVIEW and how important it is for the robot to work. The only people who really know anything about it are myself and the person you were helping at CMP, Alex.

Oh, and I'm looking to completely redo the dashboard because IMO it sucks and I hate how half the screen is taken up by a camera that we probably will never use. When we went to a practice event a few weeks before CMP (without a practice robot, of course) at 180's place, I looked at their driver station and OHMYGOD JAVA SMARTDASHBOARD. It's so prettyyyyyy~

And Arduinos on the robot. Can't forget that.

Originally Posted by who716

Fundraising -snip-
Robot build -snip-
Kids interest -snip-
Recruiting -snip-

That's a fantastic recruiting idea. I wanted to have some kind of assembly at school (if we get the robot back in time) to show the bot off before the end of this school year, so kids have something to think about all summer, and perhaps learn over the summer with the rest of the team. If we can find some space to do it, it would be awesome to have everyone drive the robot and get into robotics.

We actually had that idea for fundraising, going to people's doors and all. However, the person we asked to be in charge of that apparently runs 5-6 clubs at school and doesn't care all that much, even though he keeps telling us he does. I'm trying to find someone else who wants to direct the fundraising along with some parents on the team, which we need to recruit more of. Where I live, everyone owns a small business locally and it's a perfect opportunity to recruit some sponsors.

I think our major issue during build season was the fact that we didn't have a lot of people helping. We had "mandatory" meetings at my house (where we built the robot) on Saturday, but I encouraged people to ask me if they can come over during the week to help. Needless to say, nobody really came over except my close friends, and we built a lot of the robot, along with two mentors. I really want to change that for next year.


There is an engineering class at my school and we brought the teacher along to CMP, and he loves it (we also paid for him, but school reimbursed us at the last minute). We're trying to convert a classroom-like space in his engineering class (not really engineering, he teaches MasterCAM but the students like to use 1/32" endmills to pocket out a 1" deep large area, so they don't learn much) to be clear of anything and find an unused milling machine and lathe for it.

My dad is willing to donate our old smallish milling machine that we used all build season since we just brought in an ACRA Mill from work and a local team coach mentor guy told us a school 30 minutes away may have a completely unused Bridgeport with CNC equipment on it. That leaves us a lathe to get, but it can't be all that difficult to find a lathe. Plus, we can use the mill as a lathe if we want! Powers of machining.

But yeah the school is red taping us to hell and it's annoying, and they don't really support robotics as much as they should. After I submit this, I will be typing up a proposal so I can have a meeting with the teacher, a mentor, and the school's administration about how beneficial actually supporting us will be.

Sorry for the long message. :c

[Kevin Phan]

You can always change the layout of the LabVIEW Dashboard. I got rid of the camera image on the left and replaced it with sensor values that our drivers and coach should watch out for if something goes horribly wrong and for me to debug quickly in the pits to see what is going on. Currently I'm working on a couple more LabVIEW projects that will help immensely for the future.