Hello everyone and welcome to the Team 2412 offseason build thread! I’m Jonah Kowal, the Technical Director for the Robototes and I’ll be writing here weekly chronicling the progress of our technical team, which includes both our Programming and Mechanical teams.
Curious about the Robototes? Visit our website at www.robototes.com!
Getting back to business - Weeks of 9/4 and 9/11
Our first two weeks of whole-team meetings since the end of the school year! We had a lot to get done.
Recruiting, recruiting, recruiting
Both our programming team and mechanical team are a bit low on members. Not only that, our programming team is ~70% senior. So recruiting was super important this year. Fortunately, we planned for this. During the summer, we ran a programming bootcamp, teaching incoming freshman and current highschoolers Java, with the hope that some of the attendees would then join our programming team. The camp was very successful in this regard, with several of the programming camp attendees later expressing interest in joining the team.
The first week of school we held two open shop times. Anyone from the school could come down to the shop during these times and learn about robotics. At these meetings we collected a list of names and emails of students interested in the team.
We also showed off our t-shirt cannon at the back-to-school assembly. Here’s a video of us testing the cannon before the assembly.
Next, we reached out to the interested students and invited them to attend our orientation meeting. At this meeting we went over the basics of FIRST and our team, and gave more information on our first meetings and the path to joining the team.
Overall, our recruiting this year seems to have been very successful. We had a very good showing at the orientation and we’re hoping that we see a similar amount of people at our first meeting.
Getting the squad back together
Today was our first whole team meeting since the end of the school year. This meeting was composed of only returning team members; new team members will have their first meeting this Monday. At this meeting we focused on creating training plans, setting the goals for the year, and tuning the robot for offseason competitions.
On the programming team, we split into two groups. One group was focused on creating curriculum for teaching WPILib to new programmers, while the other group focused on getting the robot’s programming in tip-top shape for our offseason events.
We change up our table configuration each meeting on the Programming Team. This week had a triangle.
The mechanical team split into three groups. One group focused on redoing the bumpers on our Hummingbonk robot to get it ready for offseason competitions. Another group focused on creating CAD training materials for our incoming mech team members. The last group was training electrical - not a ton of members on our mechanical team are experienced in electrical and we’re trying to change that.
The general theme for today’s meeting and the past two weeks in general has been that of recruiting and preparing our team for the offseason. Evidently, we’re all very excited for the next few meetings welcoming our new members.
That wraps up the first offseason build post! See you next week!
