Inspired by Dean Kamen’s’ speech at Worlds last year, we came up with designing trading cards to promote FIRST as a sport.
The idea is that you can collect your favorite teams’ cards year after year and trade them. This has been done successfully for decades in all other sports.
The cards themselves are inexpensive to produce and can be uniquely designed to reflect your team’s spirit. Not only that, but they are more environmentally friendly than pins.
We have designed a sample for you to get ideas and attached a google slide for you to easily create your own trading cards.
Tips:
The cards size is 2.5 by 3.5 inches
Add a small edge all the way around to give room for cutting. Remember to make sure there isn’t any writing in this extra area
A printer only needs one example of your front and back of the card
You can print them yourselves by setting up an 8.5 x 11" page with three card widths and height. This can be printed on cardstock using a home printer.
You can simply make a copy of the attached template, and customize it for your team.
This is a great idea! 1723 did this as a scouting tool in 2018. We handed out a card to every team at our events and it listed our robot’s capabilities and some of our strategy preferences. They worked pretty well I think.
Yeah we printed our robot specs in 2019 on a standard index card and listed our speeds and other things teams check for, as well as a render of our robot for visual ID.
These worked extremely well when we were busy on Thursday (as last year at GNR was a snowstorm, and over 75% of our team was stuck 2 hours south). It was nice to be able to hand a card to scouters and then answer the one or two unique questions they had, instead of the same 10 questions over and over.
This sounds like a great idea! It makes more sense than shirt trading or button collecting. I bet we could make a game out of this by have different stats for the robot and playing ‘maches’ with them.
This has also been done in the local STEMLEY offseason event here for a while (I do not know how long) and is very much a good way to expand the interactions between teams (each team gets a pack or two free and other members of teams or spectators will buy packs to get more cards and trade with teams to get the event set. The event is run by 4039 and 5406 so they will know more about it than me on the organizing side of things. I am just a team member that has been asked about cards by probably ~10 people when we have attended (and that is just me on my team)