Off-Season Events

Competition Off-Season Events
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Hey, now that the season is officially over, I was wondering what fun things teams did in the off season? At Team RUSH 27, we Host the RUSH Regatta, cardboard boat building contest in which teams of 2-4 are put together and have to build a cardboard boat to compete in a race! It’s tons of fun! This will be the third year that we are doing it. It does three very important things for our team:

  1. Engineering Chalenge for our members (and whoever else joins in on the fun)

  2. Entrepreneurship activity and Fundraiser (each team has to get local sponsors to sponsor the boat, bringing in funds for Team RUSH)

  3. Mentor-Mentee experience. This activity allows our incumbent members to mentor the new RUSHies and teach them about the design process, engineering fundamentals, and already have multiple friends on the team before the Season is even near starting!

I know how much fun Team RUSH has in the off season, but what activities do everyone else do?

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  1. Summer Knowledge Transfer (Programming, CAD)
  2. Collaboration (Maybe)
  3. VRC (HUGE)
  4. Various practicing and mind cool down/warm up.
  5. GRITS
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Summer Pygames!!

Thanks to everyone who visited our booth to learn about Pygames and the OX laptop project.

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  1. “End-of-the-year” picnic, with team members, alumni who are in town, parents, and mentors.

2. School supply collection, sorting, and donation.

  1. Fixing up and improving the current robot (or in this year’s case, re-building it and testing out new ideas)

  2. Off-season events (Kettering Kickoff, and possibly a new one that I don’t know much about)

This year, we also plan on using the summer to continue workshops and training, and encourage the veteran students to explore areas of the team that they normally wouldn’t have time to work with during the regular season.

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Our team will be doing the following

Meetings:
End of the season party/meeting
Shake out meeting (What went wrong/right)
2011 Meeting plans

Competitions:
BattleCry @ WPI
Beantown Blitz
Where’s Wolcott

Events:
Parades
Car washes
Spaghetti dinner
Local fair
End of the year team picnic

Robot:
Training new freshmen (Build, programming, electrical)
Sub team projects (prototyping new 6WD, more work with CAN)
Rebuilding and fixing robots cannibalized for 2010
Rebuilding Debbie (the practice robot)
Team building and engineering exercises

I’m probably missing a few odds and ends, but as is seen, we keep pretty busy over the summer

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My team has to discuss a few things before we commit, but here’s some our agenda…

Events:
Annual Team Banquet
IRI (if we get in)
TNT
GRITS

Projects:
motorized cart
t-shirt canon
walking robot (that’s a personal one though :p)

And then they also need to get up and recruit some more…

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Invitationals Invitationals Invitationals
This year we are going to:

PA Challenge
Beantown Blitz
Where is Wolcott (Ours)
[BR]2

We are also getting ready to start running Jr FLL teams and hosting an event at the beginning of school next year.

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I might build a robot.
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/04/armatronic_soccer-playing_beer-deli.html

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This off-season 33 is doing the Lighthouse Hunger Walk, Holy Family FIRST Lego League Camp, probably a bunch of off-season tourneys, demos, planning for nexy year already :slight_smile:

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We kick off our off season with a team picnic, and then get going from there!

The FEDS participate in a bunch of things over the off season

FEDS Related
Cleaning the shop
Wiring up robots for parades
Planning the budget

Public Awareness
Relay for life
Local parades
School demonstrations
Local fairs (maybe)
Fundraisers!

Off Seasons
Tardec Invitational
MARC
IRI
Kettering Kickoff (maybe)
And our own off season (details to come!)

On top of that, there may be things here and there, but that is the just of it!

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Please, please, please keep us updated on that off-season event.

For our off-season we are doing some training of new members for design and programming and building our “Chairman’s Resume”.

Off-Season Events:
MARC
Kettering Kick-Off (haven’t seen info for 2010 yet)
WMRI (haven’t seen info for 2010 yet)
Feds Competition! We would love to come! (Robotics FEDeration Competition?)

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