School Regcognition

[Ari423]

Let me preface this with I'm sure there are other threads on this topic, but search didn't find anything within the past few years so I decided to start a new thread.


My team is going through some changes, and we are practically starting fresh with all new students. (We only have 2 or 3 students who regularly came to meetings returning from last year) Because of this, we are working on strong recruiting efforts. In these efforts, we found that very few people in the school (that is students, teachers, and administrators) knew that the team exists, let alone what it does and what it stands for (because FIRST is more than robots).

Many administrators don't know that there is a robotics room in the school, much less where it is (it's in the basement so few people go there). For recruiting purposes, on one day last year I drove to all of my classes on a robot testbed chassis with a chair on top (we call it the wheelchair), and many people were so surprised that high school students can build something mechanical that drives around and can support a person (it can support multiple people actually, but that's besides the point). We go to pep rallies and throw Frisbees into the crowd with the 2013 robot, but people don't realize that they can build something like that themselves. We drive our robots around the cafeteria during our club fair week, even driving the robot into the lunch line to buy lunch. This usually gets a few kids to sigh up, but most forget about the team and never come to any meetings (despite multiple personal reminders) or they come to one meeting and then promptly forget about the team. I remember one person who signed up at the fair three years in a row and was very excited to join the team, but forgot about us as soon as they finished signing up. When the fair came around again the next year, it was as if they never saw us the year before. We go to our middle schools and show off the robot and let the kids drive it; they are very interested but forget about it by the time they come to the high school. We have done displays a few times for our school board and they love it, but they forget about us as soon as we leave. It even went as far as our elementary school principal inviting FRC teams from other nearby school districts to their science day without inviting us because he didn't know we existed.

Even with all of this outreach to our school and our feeder schools, kids and adults alike are still surprised to hear that the school has a robotics team. We have been around since 1999, and there has been a FRC team at our high school since before then (we merged with another nearby team in '99). We have never been a big team (7-10 kids nominal, 25-30 kids max in a 1200 student high school), but you would think after more than 15 years people would remember us.

So our school badly needs to be inspired, and we aren't doing a good enough job right now. How recognized is your team within you school and district? What do you do to promote your team within your school, district, and community?