It seems like the 2018 FIRST Robotics Competition Season teaser has been well received by the community. Between YouTube and Facebook, we’ve already exceeded 100,000 views. And most comments I’ve seen have been positive.
While 100,000 views is great, we want more! Please help get the word out about FIRST and FRC by continuing to share the teaser, in any way possible, and even beyond folks you think might be interested in getting directly involved. Remember the Vision of FIRST is cultural. And we can’t transform our culture if people don’t know about us!
After the teaser came out, I shared it with several friends my age who had heard something about FIRST from me over the years but aren’t likely to get directly involved. Sure, I had to go old-school to share it (mailing them the teaser on Betamax cassette*), but it was worth it. After viewing, one responded “wow wow wow wow!”, so I call that a win.
We’ve gone through several rounds of testing on the new system, and it seems to be performing as expected. We’re currently finalizing a user’s guide which will walk you through the steps, using screenshots, of submitting your preferences. We plan to post that guide tomorrow.
Preference submission will open at Noon Eastern time this Thursday, September 21st, and close at Noon Eastern time next Thursday, September 28th. There is no advantage in event assignments to getting your preference submission in early, and you can change your preferences as often as you like, without penalty, before the deadline. But please don’t wait until the last minute to submit your preferences. As we’ve said several times, the best way to guarantee you will be on time is to plan to be early. Power outages and network interruptions happen all the time, and if they happen to you five minutes before the deadline, and you haven’t submitted yet, you will not be in a happy place.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make sure you email this guide out and tweet about it and Facebook share it and blog about it and call your congress critter about it. Do all the things to get it into as many mentor eyeballs as you are the teaser video. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE.
EDIT: Also, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make a guide like this for STIMS so 125 doesn’t have to this year. PLEASE!!! Let teams help you with translating it into other languages instead of making it.
Also, if you have a willing staff member, have them make a YouTube video walkthrough too.
And I pray to the silicon Gods I don’t have to spend another 20-some-odd hours, and I don’t know how many calls to FIRST, walking parents and students through STIMS this year.
See, that’s all well and good, but I already used my throwaway “STIMS seems to intentionally get less use friendly every year” joke at our parent meeting this year and I’d hate to have to retire it.
