What is the age limit for the build? I thought the rules said 24? or after High School, do students need to be student mentors only?
I am going to talk to our local city college to sponsor an all-city FIRST team, since my efforts at the local HS’s, haven’t worked out.
Thanks
Bill
The team must contain high school students as they must drive the robot. However anyone the team wishes to build the robot may including college students mentors or corporations. There is no age limit.
The rules define a “pre-college” student as drivers and robocoach. Junior / community college students aren’t pre-college. (In one of the Q&A’s they defined dual enrollment as being pre-college.)
But there’s no age or education limit on who may work on the robot.
The River City Robots is a team open to anyone in the community - we are not associated with any specific school district. We have kids from 6 different schools and half a dozen home schooled kids. Before I started with the team, the group formed a non-profit and the FRC team is one part, we usually have 7-12 FLL teams each year as well.
We have no teachers on our team just mentors, a few who are parents with kids on the team or have graduated already.
Since we aren’t with a school, we rely on a donor for space and we have very few ‘power tools’, we just got a band saw and drill press last year.
When you look at our bot, you can tell it was ‘handmade’, but we’ve managed to place 9th in the St. Louis Regional for the last 2 years (can’t remember where we were in 2006).
Good luck to you in starting a team - if we can help in any way, please let us know.
DeAnna