can anyone give me some ideas on how to get more students to join my team?
thank you
team 521Hold a recruitment assembly at your school. Show off last year’s robot and provide a sign up sheet/website for all interested students.
Last year team 578 went to the championship for the 1st time in 7 years (not because they won a regional, only because they were able to go).
This year their team doubled in size. Correlation? (probably!)
If your school has a club pub fair, set up moving robots and screaming team members all over the place. Invite kids to your local regional. Host expos at alum meetings, in the library, at football homecoming, whatever. Have races in between the football team and your robots, or soccer matches in between this years robot and soccer players. Have people driving the robots around the school all day.
How big is your team/how big do you want it to be? Because on my team, the less people show up, the more we get done.
Depending on your resources, you should extend robotics to the local middle school. We tried that this year and it looks like we are going to have a large freshman body in upcoming years.
From personal experience we have done:
-8th Grade orientation booths
-Hosted a FLL tournament (you don’t have to go that far but you could sponsor a team or mentor a team and they would go into highschool knowing someone).
-“Day in the Park”, there is a outing every year which clubs at my highschool set up booths and give kids something to do, we took the tenis court and ran our robot around for a while.
-At the begining of the year we have an announcement that there is a meeting in one of the technology education rooms afterschool. We usually get about 5-10 kids in that and we explain what the team offers and what FIRST can offer you towards your future. Most of which stay.
I hope this can help?
The science and math teachers in all four grades of your HS should be briefed about FIRST and the team and the benefits (esp ALL the scholarships) - and ask them to both recommend students to the team, and to recommend the team to students they feel would benefit from the program.
Thats how my daughter ended up on the team. When she was a freshman her science teacher pulled her aside after class and said “this would be great for you - you should attend the 1st meeting and check it out”.
I have a similar question. Once you get the new people here, how do you make them stay? This year our team started the year with like 40 people and ended with the usual 25.
Also, we’d like to keep the enthusiasm and involvement in the team up. There are always about a core of only 5 or 6 student who do most of the work and the rest are just there for the free ride. How do you get everyone interested and excited about robotics. For me, that came naturally and very quickly. Does it just require time?
We also have the problem with keeping kidsinvolved. We will have 40 kids durring the beging part of the meeting but once there is work to do most of them leave and party a Papa Gino’s. Most of the work is left up to a core set of 10 or so students.
Many of the students who went to the local regional with us didn’t even know how the game worked. Does anyone know how to get students to work willingly?
Students have one fundemental question: Whats in it for me?
(that is not a bad thing).
If they dont see the benefit they will get from the program, they wont stay. Why should they?
Same thing happens on my team. I like it better with less people at the school. However, I wish there were more kids to fundraise and stuff.