Continuing the discussion from FIRST and Vendors: Something has to change:
Would you (and other FTC involved folks) say there’s less alumni engagement in the FTC Community than FRC? If so, do you have any ideas on why that may be?
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Anecdotally, there is a TON of FLL alumni involvement so it’s interesting that there is maybe less in FTC.
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Having been in FTC and seen FRC, there is definitely a lot less alumni engagement in FTC.
I don’t know what the root cause is, and to be honest I think its more a series of causes then any one.
There is definitely a lot less mentor involvement overall, I think in part due to the “simpler” nature of FTC and there just not being a culture of having mentors at all. The “Middle Class” (The sort of middle to high level of FTC) is fiercely independent and has been for a long time culturally, the involvement of mentors being seen as a negative (almost an attitude of “oh you aren’t good enough to do it on your own so you are getting an adult to help/teach you”).
This has certainly been very, very slowly changing but definitely affects peoples opinions there.
Team life also doesn’t help, with teams dying and popping up constantly. It can be hard to attach yourself to a team that wasn’t yours, and if your team was a school team that doesn’t allow alumni mentors or a community team that died (its pretty common for community and school teams to die after the core founders graduate).
There just isn’t a feeling that alumni involvement is necessary. Or even welcome. The second part contrasts greatly to FRC where I feel alumni and mentors are just as core to the program as the students, alumni in FTC are more treated as relics of another age, less mentors offering guidance and more old folks yelling at clouds. Granted, people do listen, and this isn’t universal, but FTC has been student dominated far more then FRC.
I also feel FTC kids tend to prefer this. A lot of FTC kids will routinely call FRC “mentorbuilt” or other similar words because they feel there is too much mentor involvement. I don’t know what the right balance is but I do think FTC could certainly benefit from more mentors and alumni
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Yes. Actually, proportional to FRC involvement, I’m not sure, given how much larger FRC teams tend to be. But I generally don’t see FTC alumni mentor super often. Anecdotally, a bigger portion will volunteer, but engagement tends to just not be there.
I have a few theories/observations for why this is:
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Burnout of team leads that were heavily involved in their teams, as they often end up responsible for a large portion of their team’s responsibilities and so when they graduate they put distance between them and the program (which i mean, good for them)
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Stigma against alumni involvement in general or “mentorbuiltness” — the tolerance levels for mentor involvement are lower in FTC versus FRC. I think some of it comes from FTC’s heritage as “FLL with Tetrix” especially with many community FLL teams becoming FTC teams. The scale of the program, as Eeshwar said, also means that you can field competitive teams without strong mentor involvement. (In some cases, despite mentor involvement)
Teams that do have consistent alumni mentors tend to catch flak for it one way or another, even if it’s not deserved. -
few amounts of sustainable and competitive FTC programs to mentor or even come back to — many competitive teams live out of their captain’s basement and die when said captain graduates. Vex sells hard to schools and FTC, despite promises, has never had a coherent curriculum. The program I graduated from has lasted since the FVC era, which is about 4 or 5 eternities by FTC standards. Team leads in general would rather focus on being competitive while they are still in the program instead of building out a sustainable team that will last years after they are gone.
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general program disillusionment, but I find these people actually are more likely to stay engaged once graduated
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Hmmmm…
I see more college age alumni volunteering with events than helping with individual teams. But as a Michigan FTC is only middle schoolers, I don’t see a lot of clamor to help with that age group in any program 
Only weirdos like me seem to enjoy that age group!
That said, our FRC high schoolers are THE BOMB when coming up to help. I see team loyalty - checking the teams out in the league standings, helping when they can, and helping with the events. We have had several Seniors and Juniors coach “their” FTC teams.
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Our FTC program (4 teams) runs for 7-8th graders. We often have some of them come back and mentor as high schoolers while they are participating in FRC. Generally all our program alumni that come back to help did FRC and then support our FRC team.
Being located next to an engineering college, we’ve had a few college aged FTC alumni help out for a bit but most seem to prefer mentoring one of the 4 local FRC teams.
Here in Indiana, I haven’t seen as much of the adult mentor bad, student only mentality as I have seen by some of the 1%ers online.
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I’m actually going to pose another question: how does alumni involvement in FTC compare to, say, the Vex Robotics Competition?
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Hard for me to make a comparison, since the FTC community in Ontario is still so young. But I can speak generally about alumni involvement in VRC, or at least what it was like while I was still involved. There are a lot of alumni involved as event volunteers, especially at Worlds. The presence of a university level competition (VEX U) also helps keep graduates of high school teams around. In terms of mentorship, the “student only” paradigm runs very deep in VRC. This was strengthened by the introduction of pretty strict written rules in the game manual to limit mentor involvement on robots. (Although this was almost certainly a response to the perception of mentors being too involved in certain countries, as well as the involvement of parents as opposed to alumni)
There is a very vocal VRC community, and I believe there are a lot of alumni involved in those groups. Someone like @Tabor473 could probably give a more detailed answer.
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Ya numbers wise I can’t compare it to FTC but the anecdotes above about FTC alumni sounds reasonably similar to VRC.
Events often have a lot of alumni volunteering but few teams are actively mentored by alumni. Most VRC teams have little to no mentor/institutional knowledge outside of the current team members. The mentor role being filled by a math or science teacher. Most of us see this as a feature not a bug. It’s super cool to look at a power house team dominate for a few years and then drop in quality considerably when the main person graduates. (It really shows just how student focused the program is)
Because VRC has a 12 month season a lot of students stay on their teams for the summer or longer depending on school schedules. New Zealand students for example graduate highschool at the end of the calendar year so still compete for several months into college if they are going to worlds.
What VRC has going for it is has a lot of alumni who see VRC as the premier program while FTC I imagine people see as something they did before they did FRC. And VEXU keeps a lot of the best students in the program for extra years and many of them choose to stick around afterwards. Great feeder program for mentors.
My experience was 1 year of FLL, 1 year of FTC, 1 year of FRC, 5 years of VRC and 4 years of VEXU before I became purely a mentor. The community has several alumni who are still very active but are not affiliated with any team now and have not been for several years.
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Mentor here of a number of VRC and VIQ teams.
We have our senior VRC teams do all of the beginning classes around mechanical construction and what the sensors can be used for. As an adjunct to the teaching aids (ie plates with different gear configurations, chains, etc) they also use last years robot as an example. They also teach a game analysis and strategy session (an hour) and then help facilitate the second hour of teams thinking about what their strategy will be.
I have roboteers that have aged out of VIQ (we only do elementary school) go back and mentor the VIQ teams. This year it’s actually a group of juniors that are leveraging their VIQ and VRC knowledge to mentor the VIQ roboteers.
There are two college age, one has come to co-teach all of the programming to the VRC roboteers. The other has started 2 teams that they mentor.
And for what it’s worth, some of our alumni when they came home for the Holiday stopped by a build night and checked out all the robots and offered advice/answered questions.
But other than the VIQ there isn’t a lot of alumni involvement.
Our Delmarva program is new (2012), so I don’t expect to see college graduates coming back until next season. (Most that I’m in contact with are going to grad school)
Absolutely. Few things I can see on my end and a couple personally feel too:
Looking at some of our metrics FRC content has a much higher engagement for 18-24 year olds versus our FTC content. I realize that 18 includes those still in school but it’s a noticeable difference. This tells me that recent alumni are not as engaged in our content in FTC as they are in FRC. We’re of course not the only barometer and our FTC viewership base is smaller than FRC but we still are the largest content creator covering FTC.
FUN FTC has experienced a significant amount of turnover with our high school hosts when they become alumni in the past. These students are just as excited and dedicated to their FIRST program as FRC students but after they graduate something seems to consistently change. Most seem to quite quickly become disengaged from the program (and then from FUN also) during their first year as alumni and almost all are completely done by the end of their first year out.
I have a few gut feelings on why this is happening and to me there’s a few factors. The big two are how mentors are viewed in FTC and also how FTC leadership structures FTC and it lack of communication.
Mentors: In general, FRC programs are structured to be much more focused on mentorship and more importantly the relationship between students and mentors, especially mentors that are not teachers or parents. Working with mentors that are professionals in their field with no other ties like being a parent or a teacher I believe opens the door much wider for alumni to come back and mentor themselves in a similar circumstance where they may not be a teacher or parent. This also results in the general relationship of a mentor on a team with students and also the attitude that current students have towards mentors. Mentor/student relationships in FTC seem to be much closer to how FLL programs are ran than FRC programs.
FTC Leadership: The structure of FTC programs is much more… un-regulated than what FRC is. While some changes have been made to events, there is little guidance and support created for teams compared to FRC. Game Manual 0 (GM0) is a good example of the community coming together for support but looking at something like the FTC Blog you’ll see how much less communication there seems to be from leadership and this is during the middle of their season. Imagine if FRC programs only posted communications from Jan-Apr once every 2-6 weeks. It just doesn’t seem like the direction from Ken and other leadership members is focused on connecting with their community and communicating. What does this have to do with alumni? If you are on a team that is not connected to the community and there isn’t an active drive to bring alumni back to the program as we see in FRC then your alumni engagement and involvement are going to be significantly lower. There needs to be a large drive from the top to bring alumni back to teams and this will make help FTC bolster it’s culture and retain programs longer.
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I would also like to note that during the initial creation of Game Manual 0 there was very much a goal of keeping information in the program from when people graduate—a great goal, but it does demonstrate the belief that once people graduate their knowledge is essentially lost.
This can also be seen in the current contributor base. For example, in the past year, most have been students, but there have been a handful of alumni contributors. Most of these are college freshmen/sophomores, and only a couple of the original contributors are still involved (who are now mostly college seniors/graduates).
Personally, I don’t find teams dropping in quality cool or exciting. I would much rather see teams that learn over time and continuously improve, bringing up the level of engineering and play in the whole program (if enough teams follow such a trend).
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