Hello everyone. I have been playing around with the idea for a new off season event. It would be an event where we get a panel of expert mentors from various teams in the area together, and hold something like an open forum. It would give teams a chance to ask more direct questions from a wide variety of expert mentors.
The general theme of the event would be: how to make a great FRC program. I think it can appeal to teams of all levels. Rookie teams looking for valuable insight, average teams looking to take their program to the next level, and it would give super-competitive teams a chance to learn new ideas from other great teams, and share their knowledge with others.
So my question to you is, is this something you would attend? If you wouldn’t mind taking the time, I have a really quick google form here that I would love for you guys to fill out: http://goo.gl/forms/lCj0Y6yY9s
All input is welcome, so please feel free to bring up new ideas below. This is still in the very early stages, so any and all ideas are welcome! Thanks again everyone, and I hope you have an awesome off-season.
Sounds pretty cool. I think a livestream or at least an online archive of the event could be useful to teams who want to learn from it but aren’t able to travel to wherever it’s being held.
There are a number of seminar events spread throught the country similar to what your proposing, such as the SRS and SPLASH events in Minnesota, as well as the Purdue Forums in Indiana.
Most of these events are usually geared towards younger or lower-performing teams, and talks often focus on basic, core concepts about the engineering and non-engineering side of FIRST.
Could you clarify how your event differs from these? It sounds like you’re aiming for a similar event with topics at a higher level, like the seminars at the World Championship, but I don’t want to assume what your intentions are.
So this would be an event that can appeal to all levels of teams. Because I would want to structure it more like an open forum, it would give teams to ask more direct questions about how expert mentors run their teams. Again this is still in the conceptual phase, but it might be worth having the first hour be like a “Rookie Hour” where new teams can ask the more basic questions. This would make it more approachable to the newer teams, knowing that they won’t get steam rolled with things that are over their heads, and it would incentivize teams that perform at a higher level to come, knowing that the conversation won’t be dominated by questions they’ve heard before or seem obvious to them. Maybe a schedule of this could be:
6:00 - 6:15 Introductions
6:15 - 7:15 Rookie Hour
7:15 - 7:30 Social/Mixer for Rookies and expert mentors
7:30 - 8:30 Regular open forum
8:30 - 9:00 Social/Mixer
Again this is just conceptual, but this is how I see this event going.
