I am collecting data on which team uses which program, and if you could decide right now, which program you would prefer your team to use. I am using this data to move my team to a better platform. Thank you so much!
Use Slack its free and easy to use End of story!
FIRST Robotics Research Project Help Request from a Student from Team 3340 Magnegeeks
Hello, mentors/advisors of Combustible Lemons robotics teams.
I am a student from Team 3340 Magnegeeks and I have a scientific research project on hand so I would like to request a picture of your robot’s drive chassis for 2016 FIRST Stronghold. If you do not have a picture of subject, I would like the following…
-The type of drive you used (ex: tank, R-T traction, swerve, etc.)
-If the drive is not a continuous drive chassis aka tank, please indicate…
-the type of wheel
-the number of wheels
-the size of the wheels
If your drive is a continuous drive chassis please indicate what kind of tread it is (ex: traction, mecanum, omni, etc)
-If you use a mix of wheel please indicate that, too
P.S. If you have the website from where you purchased the drive from that would be great, too
P.P.S I fill out your form*
I would prefer slack or discord, and I’m using these results to persuade my team.
Thank you, it’s all good, I just confirmed with my data on you guys, it’s aligned.
Can you publicize your data once it is finished? We are also considering a more reliable communication method.
Sure! I’ll make another post on chief delphi, reddit, and the FRC discord server, which are the three places I posted this. I will post the data in a few days.
I know that it may be an unpopular opinion, but I definitely prefer GroupMe. Last year my team actually tried to switch over to Slack, but wound up abandoning that effort and just sticking with what had already worked for us: GroupMe.
In general, I find that most of our students already have GroupMe for one reason or another so they find it inconvenient to have to download another app. GroupMe allows you to create events, easily add or remove members, mute chats, and is reliable, and for us, that’s all we need. Slack was more complicated and we simply didn’t need that. However, regardless of what platform you use, my best advice is to create a serious chat and a goofy one. It helps streamline information distribution if people have a place to put memes and jokes and a place to put important stuff.
How come there is no “other” option for “If your team could use any service, what would you prefer best?”?
We use a phpBB forum and it suites our needs just fine. (However I cannot communicate this through the current google form.)
I’m going to second this, as we use Bitrix24 and it works well for us. Note that I am not submitting a form as this option is lacking.
Would highly suggest slack - you can get a heavy discount for being associated with an educational institution and you can get it for free if you are a non-profit organization. In addition to the effective channel layout of the service, there are a number of useful integrations (google calendar, google drive, asana, etc). The Slack support staff are also awesome and happy to help out with anything. We’ve been using it since 2014.
I’m thinking about slack or discord. If slack had roles, I would absolutely go slack. I just love the feature of roles, which discord has. I love being able to do @Programming and notify everyone on programming. I also love being able to give certain roles access to certain channels. Does slack have a similar feature? I tried slack out, but couldn’t find one like it. Slack would be easier to persuade my team to switch to, and I have a family member who works at slack and I am actually going to meet a ton of programmers at slack in about a week, which will be exciting.
Slack has user groups, which I think is similar to what you are talking about.
We use Remind and social media to announce things, but so far as just basic conversation we generally go the old fashioned way and just use our mouths. That is not to say some of our students do not form group chats among themselves, but we have yet to feel the need for a whole team group.
We’ve used slack for over a year now, and it’s a great improvement over e-mail (N-way) and text blasts. We still use a bit of e-mail for a couple of the booster club members, but mostly all slack. It’s great that when a new person is included in an existing conversation, they have an easy way to catch up with the conversation. I haven’t used any of the others, so I can’t say which is better.
At a basic level, you do the same thing with Slack. Announcements are made in the #general channel, and people can have Direct Messages with one another. I think the advantage of Slack is transparency of discussions - we have a public channel for each subteam and anyone can join and see what is going on. This is great for new members trying to learn about the team as well as mentors who need a way to keep up with team happenings.
You might want to broaden your survey a bit, or change your questions to collect data more granularly. For instance, our official team communication is done over email so that 1) our official communication is on a platform that students, parents, sponsors, etc all have access to 2) students are already using email, and requiring them to keep up with additional means of communication is difficult. We use Discord for a TON of discussion and informal communication, far more than we do email. I couldn’t really put that in your survey though.
I and I am sure others would appreciate you releasing these results.