I am trying to gage interest from students and mentors on the idea of a college hosting an FRC learning day during the off season in December. The event would be hosted on a college campus and include learning opportunities for programming, CAD, and manufacturing, as well as a mini career fair with sponsors of the college and tours of campus. I understand that FRC learning materials are widely available but is this something you or your team would be interested in attending? What other suggestions would you have to make the event a fun and enriching day?
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Which college makes a big difference I’d think, can you provide some more specifics?
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Here in the Silicon Valley, we do this once or twice in the pre-season. Here are some of the topics:
https://wrrf.org/conference/sessions/.
They’re presented by mentors or teams. They’re very well attended, students are requested to bring $5 or $10 for sodas and pizzas.
North Dakota State University is considering hosting this event.
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Gotcha, being from Michigan not sure how much value my input will have to you.
Our students are always looking for scholarship opportunities, getting in touch with admissions people, maybe getting a tour so this sounds like a win win especially targeted at juniors and seniors who are at that right age range.
It would be cool to include some playing fields for FLL or FTC as they are relatively simpler to setup and take less floor space. Live robots make any event better and it helps FRC teams who might not be as familiar with the other programs get to see it as well.
If you are able to coordinate with local teams maybe offering up some presentation slots for teams to get to talk to the people/teams there about their projects, skills they can teach, etc. Students on teams don’t get as many opportunities to talk to a large group as I’d like. This would be a way for teams to share what info they already have.
As a member of a MN FRC team, 2491, I would look into Jumpstart. This is a similar program in central MN that has a bunch of workshops for FRC teams in topics ranging from CAD to Scouting to April tags. There also is Gitchi Gummi at U of MN Duluth which is a similar thing with an additional aspect of fun matches. Looking into those might be good research for what MN teams are looking for or what is lacking in the sector, given the fact that there are not that many teams in ND or SD (maybe 30 across both states).
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It looks like you are aiming for it to be more like a conference than a traditional off-season competition.
We have hosted one for the past few years where local teams come and present about topics that they know about. Teams also come without presentations if they want to learn. We had about 70 students from 6-7 teams come for the event for the past few years.
We generally host in our school, but it could work in a larger venue like a college. Something we experimented with this year is having a panel discussion where team representatives discussed different topics and answered questions.
We have more information and previous presentations on our website: Regal Roundtables | Regal Eagles
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Contact the NMRC (Northern Minnesota Robotics Conference), go to their website and get ahold of them. We would potentially help out with a lot of things and also we have teams from the Fargo-Morehead School Districts in our confrence as well.
If you need help, let me know.
Our December Jumpstart offering is the first Saturday in December. This has been held at SCSU for its first few years and then at Becker High School the last two. I wouldn’t miss it this coming year - big changes and some new awesome offerings will be taking place.
Jumpstart Medtronic is typically the last Saturday of October (Minneapolis, Denver, and now Boston).
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Small one from an event organizer: be super clear with your terminology. I read your subject line and thought “oh, off-season tournament!” And then that you’re thinking December, which is a period where official FIRST fields are unavailable (after early November, they’re in the process of converting them to the new game).
And then I read the rest of your concept.
Which is excellent and something that should exist at greater scale. Just be aware some minds will probably jump to that conclusion. 
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