How do you guys recruit? When you have events such as Open Houses what you do promote your team and inspire the students and parents to have them join the team? We also have only 500 students. What do you tend to do during those events except for presenting the robot with shooting the Frisbees around. I know that teams tend do find middle schools, however, our schools is unique, because our students come from Asia and mainly from China and Kong so we can’t reach out to them before they come to our school and we only have 10 - 12 grades. What are you strategies to win students engagement, motivation, and interest throughout the off - season. And with communication if you have team members who do not check often their messages (especially email) do you make any rule regarding it? How you guys also gain engineering mentors and how much experience they should have in engineering?
Our team recruits at freshman orientation, before school starts. We bring the previous year’s bot and show it off. Basically, people come to our table because we have a huge robot rolling around the cafeteria. If people approach, we tell them briefly what we’re about. If they’re still interested, we get their name on a sheet. This somewhat ostentatious display draws freshmen and older siblings to us.
Last year, we did presentations for the entire school to reach everyone else (I feel the pain, we have a small school too). We put together a PowerPoint about our team and FIRST and, of course, brought the last robot. Each subteam would sum up what they do, too, to show the diversity of things to do.
As for engaging our students, we share the stories we’ve experienced. We tell new members about some of the more extreme examples of gracious professionalism we’ve seen or performed. We rely on that and the engagement of the program to keep new members around. For the off season, we play at one off season competition every year (MARC). This and fundraising (like team car washes) keeps the team together through the summer.
I’m not quite sure what you mean when you talk about communication, but I’ll try =) We have a full team meeting at the beginning of each meeting/practice. Here, our mentor updates us on important information and the students also have input. Our team captain also has all of our phone numbers, so the night before something important, he’ll send out a group text to remind us. If someone manages to completely forget something, there’s no “punishment”, just a healthy chewing out from the whole team 
Unfortunately, I’m not in any position to talk about mentors. We have one mentor who has done it for ten years. We have not had an engineering mentor in many years. We recruit for mentors at the local nuclear power plant (which we are just lucky to have five minutes from the high school). This year, a former team member came back to help out. We are grateful for any help and we manage perfectly fine without an engineer. I think it motivates, actually, but I certainly wouldn’t turn one down!
I know this is long, but I hope I helped. Feel free to PM me if you have any more questions!
Thanks a lot for the input. ^ I would appreciate more ideas from other teams to.
Every time our school does any sort of event- open houses, Respect Day, Science Fairs- we try to show off our robot. In addition, our technology teachers spend a couple minutes at the beginning of one of their classes toward the beginning of the year telling all of their students about FIRST and showing them the previous year’s robot.
That being said, our school has about 800 kids in each graduating class, so we have a much larger pool to pick from.
We also have lego league teams in our middle and elementary schools- so we get students from there as well.
Our communication issue is that we are not receiving any responses even from veteran members often online through qq (its what most of the team uses) and also we need ideas on how to keep the students engaged and eager to contribute.
In our team, we host a competition that draws tons of people, both from the school, and community. In addition, we built, as a summer project, a t-shirt cannon for use at school events and school sports. We mentor three FLL teams in the middle school of our district. We go to the annual holiday parade in our town and drive the robot there. Take a peek at our website for more info! It is http://www.team708.org . Make posters for hanging around the school, they help a lot! On communication, we use a free service called Remind 101 , it will text your members the reminders you send out to Remind 101’s servers. Just make sure they sign up! We have had great success with this on top of the usual email.
Our team tries to attend every school orientation event, and even participate in pep rallies and sporting events. We primarily push the scholarships ordeal. One of the most important things about attending the orientations is not only show off to the students, but get PARENTS to talk to PARENTS… so if you have active parents on the team, have them connect with parents who might wanna help interest their child.
Another thing our team does is have a “bring a friend to robotics” night, where they bring someone new in to check things out to get them interested.
As for the communication - it plays a huge role in upkeeping a retention rate with your current students. Our team designates a student leader to email blast a weekly team email with updates in the HTML format to display images and schedules while recruiting for team events that involve community service, or fundraising, and anything of the likes in-between!
Good luck!
When you are recruiting students, it’s important to make the robot almost the last priority. It sounds counter intuitive, but look at the variety of opportunities the team can provide to a student.
Things to highlight:
- Scholarships and Statistics: Encourage parents to have their child take part in one of the biggest scholarship opportunities ever offered in an organization. The FIRST scholarships available put other activities, (outside of sports :rolleyes: ) to shame
- Non-Technical Divisions: People “Don’t know anything about how to build a robot.” That’s not a good answer. I didn’t know how to build a robot when I joined and some could argue I still don’t, but FIRST is awesome because of other opportunities it provides. If someone has interest in creative writing, public speaking, art and graphic design, marketing, lobbying or political aspirations, photography, videography, and other things I can’t think of at 1:30 AM, a FIRST team is likely their best extracurricular vehicle for that but few FIRST teams ever talk about them. Draw people in with that, and coax them to pick up a drill or rivet gun every once in a while later on. Get them on the team now so they have an opportunity to branch out later.
- Community Service: One thing I liked on my team was the opportunity to serve the community through service projects, FLL activities, community events and fundraisers, and the like. Advertise that to team members.
Things to do:
- Have a plan: plan to hold a detailed information meeting at a set date, and maybe even a competition you attend offseason as well
- Give them something to walk away with and go to: A handout that contains statistics about FIRST and your team, the opportunities the organization and your team provide, pictures of the team, and the like, along with the usfirst.org and your team’s Facebook page or website for them to go to to learn more about FIRST and your team. Keep them interested after they leave the open house event. Keep them thinking about it.
I hope I mentioned everything I wanted to in a coherent manner. FIRST is a gift, and it’s something we have the duty to spread to as many people as possible.
Do you have pictures of your t-shirt shooting bot?
This was on their team website
http://www.team708.org/uploads/1/4/1/3/14138954/1400403_orig.jpg