The Youth and Parent Registration process for the 2018 season opened today (discussion on this thread).
The system is much easier to use than in previous years but I still decided that it might be beneficial to have a guide. I have created a Google Doc with sections for new students, new parents, returning students, and returning parents. Feel free to redistribute to your teams.
I made it very quickly so if you catch any mistakes or have suggestions for improvement, please let me know on this thread.
The guide seems to work but there is/was (it’s being fixed) an issue with schools that aren’t in the list. FIRST IT was informed and a resolution is being worked on.
I ran into the issue as well, sent them an e-mail (Haven’t heard back yet, but I suspect they’ve been pretty busy the past couple of business days!). Our school is on the list, however we draw students from a broader area than most schools, being a private catholic school. As a result, we get filtered off the list for many people when they put in their home address.
Anyone else going crazy with the clunky process for approving students in the dashboard? It takes four clicks to approve, and then the webpage automatically refreshes.
We have 100+ students on our team. It would be great to have a table-formatted roster to view/approve students simply.
It doesn’t filter people, it filters the list of schools. In the registration process, it first asks for the students address. Then on the next page, it asks for school information, including a drop down containing many, many schools. That drop down is supposed to contain all schools within 50 miles of the home address entered. When I tested it, however, my team’s school didn’t not show up, and it was only ~20 miles from the address entered.
I just received an e-mail from FIRST recommending:
Parents can bypass this by scrolling to the bottom of the school list and select “School not in list”.
One of our students found the blog post and tried to sign up. 5 minutes of Slack conversation trying to find our school. Finds it entering school zipcode. 10 minutes later parent calls asking how to do their part because their child isn’t listed when they log in.
We’re going to try and get 2 students in STIMS this year for awards – the rest will be paper. I’m not doing this again this year.
Most of ours had no problem, at least with getting the student signed up. Well… Once we figured out that the group* had used the old address for STIMS, and corrected the mistake, we didn’t have too many issues. Having the guide handy helped a lot (I think it’s been linked on our Slack 3 or 4 times now, and I had it up on my phone for quick reference).
*We were taking advantage of a parent orientation meeting to sign everybody up–team paperwork AND FIRST paperwork–so that help could be given.
Jared, any chance of a full-page shot for where the “Apply to Team” and “Invite Parent” buttons are, and a reasonably clear one? At least one of our students had a little trouble, said it was blurry. Would help for locating purposes at any rate.
Hey Eric - If I understand what you are asking for correctly, I have made the changes. You can see full screenshots for where the buttons are located on: Returning Students #4, New Students #8, and New Students #20.
Please let me know if this is what you were looking for!
Agreed. Four clicks and slow reload time to approve each student. This is very dumb, is no better than last year’s system, and still is not as good as the old usfirst.org system.
For under 18s the youth don’t actually have to do anything. For under 13, they cannot even create a profile. Simplest to tell parent to log in / create profile, register their youth. If the parent has registered a youth in previous years using the same email log in (STIMs0, the youth will already be there.
Even with the kluge acceptance, it is simpler than collecting and tracking paper waiver forms.
Yes and no. It is worse or the same for mentors but it is much better for students. While this is not a fully fixed system, they have improved it for the vast majority of users - students and parents. I would expect the system to improve for mentors just maybe not for a season or two.
Given that we have to track and keep paper permission forms for the students as part of the school requirements, another small stack + a paperclip in the folder really is massively easier than this.
Last year we had a new parent orientation meeting and at the end of that existing team members walked the new team members and their parents through the process.
We plan to do the same again this year.
The biggest issue we had was students creating an account pointing at a parent email address and that not matching the address the parents used when they logged onto firstinspires.org.