Hello All! I am very excited to announce the startup of a new rookie FRC Team at Minuteman Regional Vocational Technical High School in Lexington, MA. Chief Delphi, meet FRC 8604!
About Minuteman
Minuteman is a vocational school with students coming from over 12 different districts in the greater Boston area. Our school has 19 different career majors for students to choose from, including Engineering Technology, Robotics & Automation, Advanced Manufacturing & Welding, Carpentry, Automotive, Multimedia Engineering, Biotechnology, Environmental Science, among many others!
I was hired as the new Engineering Technology Instructor at Minuteman this past summer, and have been working throughout the fall to get the team off the ground and registered for the 2021 season. I was recently selected as the faculty advisor for the team so I will be the lead mentor!
For those unfamiliar with vocational education, the way our school is structured is students rotate between academic weeks and shop weeks. Every other week they spend the entire week, M-F, 8AM-230PM, in their career major shop. Students in the Engineering shop participate in Project Lead the Way courses, as well as custom curriculum I have been developing surrounding the many engineering disciplines students can choose to study after high school. Some of the engineering disciplines we are diving into include mechanical, civil/environmental, chemical, biomedical, aerospace, electrical, architectural and aerospace engineering.
Since Minuteman places such high value on project based, hands-on learning, FRC is a perfect fit for our students. We are lucky to have a full wood shop in carpentry, a metal fabrication shop in advanced manufacturing, as well as an Omio X8 CNC router, 3D printers and lots of power and hand tools in the Engineering shop.
About Me
Some of you may know me from FRC 6328, as I helped co-found the team back in 2016-2017 and have been managing the team since. With my recent career change I have stepped back from 6328 as team manager, but remain on the team as an outreach/chairman’s mentor. I have also been an FLL Coach since 2015, and have established 9 teams in MA since I got involved in FLL.
Since Littleton and Lexington are close by, 6328 and 8604 will have a unique opportunity to share resources between the two teams, as well as team up on outreach efforts. This will help expand our reach since 6328 is a community team and 8604 is a school team. We are calling ourselves “sister teams” and I am very excited to see where this awesome partnership takes us!
About This Thread
Following in the footsteps of 6328, 8604 will be publishing our robot build publicly here on Chief Delphi, and all the craziness along the way! We will also publish work on the other components of FRC this year (game design challenge, innovation challenge) - more details to come post Saturday’s announcement.
In addition to sharing our robot build, we will be sharing information on the start-up of our team, and best practices I have found through the development of 6328 and now 8604. This is a very broad topic, but we have a unique opportunity to document step by step what goes into FRC start-up in a school setting, which will serve as an incredibly valuable resources to future teams taking on the daunting task of starting up an FRC team. Some topics we will cover are team structure, technical and non-technical student and mentor trainings, fundraising, sponsor outreach and generally how to manage a build season with all the crazy COVID-19 restrictions.
If there are specific topics you would like to see covered, please let me know. It is going to be a crazy ride but I am beyond excited for it!
-Dee/Ms. Clark (low key don’t know what to call myself now as a join 6328/8604 mentor!!)