So I am a student on an FRC team that’s currently working with my district to implement an FTC team. My school did not have any FIRST involvement which is why the FRC team that I go to is based out of a different school district than my own.
Anyways, since I started this project I had one teacher who originally showed interest, but informed me that he will be leaving at the school year. So to fill in his place, my principal wants the new teacher to have some form of robotics experience to lead the possible FTC team.
That is why I wanted to ask if anyone can provide me with a general example schedule that their FTC team had (ie kickoff on this day, meetings on these days for this amount of hours, competitions on these days, etc.) since I need to provide a general idea to my principal the time commitment that a teacher would need to fill in a coaching position.
Since I’m in FRC, it’s been hard for me to figure out this information since I’m still generally unfamiliar with how the FTC process can work. If anyone could inform me of a general estimate on an FTC coach time commitment/team schedule, I’d greatly appreciate it!
Well we at KING TeC have around 8 FTC and we have practice 2 times a week on a normal week on Tuesday and Thursday. And the week before comp, we give 3-4 day of the week. I absolutely love this system because it forces team to be wise with there time. And also it is not a bad Idea to have a bit of a smaller team.
Our FTC teams meet Tue/Thu for 2 hours in the evening and Sat for 4 hours for most of the fall semester. As meets and other events approach, we add more hours. More than 8 hours would help, but our coaches and mentors are reluctant to keep an FRC build season level of time commitment for the whole school year. In a perfect world, we would have an FTC coach that does more hours in the early fall to get the teams off to a faster start.
FTC is just starting to take off here in Ontario. For the 2 seasons we’ve run, we run 2 nights a week for 3 hours. We use the program to train rookie members and get grade 7 + 8’s from our “feeder schools” involved with robotics early on. As such, the FTC team meets/runs at the same time our FRC team is running in the fall doing pre-season training/prep.
Perhaps a little more time would be ideal (maybe an additional 2-3 hours/week), but myself and other mentors just arent prepared/able to commit the additional time in the fall (the FRC build season from January-April is a hard enough sell to our SO’s ).
Our meeting schedule since 2014 has been approximately every Thursday from 6:30-9:00, and every Sunday from 1:00-6:00 while we are in-season (September to whenever we’re done), reducing to just the Sunday after the season is done, then taking a break for a little after school ends (early June here), then getting back to the Sunday schedule from late June/early July.
We add meetings around events, typically a Friday or Saturday all-day (these days it feels like the students never have school on Fridays anyways).
Meetings are generally 2x a week per team (we generally run staggered meetings to alleviate all 3 teams needing the same mentors/resources at the same time).
Kickoff is typically in the middle of September so we meet 1-2x before that. Each team meets about 4 hours a week during the build season. League meets are 1 day affairs. You’ll get 3 meets and a league championship. Meet start dates are based on the league but generally they are in the November to January timeframe. League champs is generally in February and state is usually in March.
Prior to COVID, all 4 teams would meet after school (3 hours) on Friday for most of the fall Semester. The school year started the first week of August, so the teams would start their meetings before kickoff. After Thanksgiving, the meeting time would be extended to 4 hours, still only 1 day per week. But around that same time, teams would generally want more time and would (could) request additional hours on weekends. Generally it would be another 3-4 hours on Saturday. After Christmas break, the weekend meetings were requested nearly 100% of the time until the end of the season (end of Feb - early March).
Meeting once per week and once per weekend has generally been enough for our teams, but the students do a lot of collaborating outside of those meeting times on their own (they will have zoom meetings to discuss the design, review the CAD or the programming, etc.). If the students do not meet outside of the normal build times, then meeting twice per week as others have suggested in their examples is probably going to be needed.
During COVID, due to limits on the number of students that could be in the build space, the teams had to meet on separate nights, so each team got assigned a separate weeknight and we created 4 weekend time slots and each team could request one slot per week.
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