I was promoted to de facto Lead Mentor for a rookie FRC team. We lost our lead mentor and only member with FRC experience in late January. There wouldn’t have been a team without his guidance, and his absence has been challenging. I’m doing everything I can to keep the team progressing and staying positive, but I’m finding the depth of FRC to be incredibly challenging.
I’m wondering what the core things I should dedicate time to for our first season and competitions, and what I can safely eschew. I’ve focused on keeping our team busy during build hours, recruiting badly needed mentors, and overall management. I know nothing of the strategy, the competitions themselves, organizing the travel, not to mention the technical issues.
Even with the challenges, our team does seem to be enjoying the experience and they’re learning, so we have that.
Try to see if you can get parents involved and to help out with some logistics like transportation to events, hotels, etc. Keeping the team focused on the robot is good because at least you’ll have something to compete with at your events. As for searching for mentors see I would check the FIRST network for mentors and maybe even considering putting a post here on CD asking for mentors.
Get the Kitbot built. If you haven’t done that yet, do it. Improve it if you can (see also: Everybot). That should handle your robot side. P.S. check your bumpers. Then put some driving time onto it.
Strategy: I’m going to say that for right now, punt it. Focus on driving and scoring.
Competitions: https://www.thebluealliance.com/ I’ll just say that you want to watch a couple of streams before going, and do it as a team if you can. Your first event is Week 3, so you’ve got a little bit of time. Pick one, two, or a lot of them. Honestly, I’d devote a weekend meeting to watching events instead of building–the only thing else I’d do is drive practice that weekend.
Technical issues: You’re in the right place, ask away!
Travel to competitions… I’m out of my depth. Biggest thing is to make sure that all the students have lodging and rides in compliance with school policies–your school admins would probably love to help with that actually, ask them if you get a chance.
Agreed on getting parents to help out too. Parent networks have an odd ability to find things…
Also, let’s try to get you into the “local” team networks. FIRST’s site doesn’t show any other teams within 50 miles, but there’s 20 teams within 100 miles, some of whom have had a presence on here. @Renee_Becker-Blau, @Tyler_Olds , y’all are a lot closer than I am and have better contacts… any chance of arranging some in-person assistance even?
This is a challenging time to be in your position. At this point, I suggest that your goal should be to ensure that your team gets to have a good time at your upcoming first competition. This boils down to:
Make sure the robot is driving by competition weekend.
Make sure the robot will be allowed to compete. Your team can check everything at home against the official inspection checklist. If you fail inspection at the event, you can work there to fix it and get reinspected, but your team can avoid the head/heartache by checking all of that in advance.
Make sure everybody can get to the event, be there, and return comfortably and safely. This means getting Consent and Release forms from everyone who’s going, making a roster of all of those people, making travel (and probably hotel) arrangements, and making food arrangements.
If everybody gets to go to the event, the robot drives in all of its matches, and everybody gets home safe, then that should ensure that everybody has a good time and wants to do it again in the future. You can improve on everything else next time!
Not for this event, but shortly after: make sure that you, or some other adult you trust, has head mentor-level access to the team’s FIRST registration page. This will be very necessary to register for future events! If you don’t have this, contact the office of your FIRST region/district.
Thanks for the reply and the pragmatic advice. The team is almost done with a build derived from the Quokkas RI3D (WCD base from the kit; shooter, and intake opposite of one another on the end of the arm; lift done with arm).
Currently, the technical issues are with the code and controls. We do not have drive control yet, but we’ll learn more tomorrow. They’re working on getting a Github set up so we can share code, which will make asking questions easier.
We’re based out of C2 Makerspace, so we don’t have the school admins to look to.
Yep, we’re on a bit of an “island.” Our region is dominated by VeX, while the closest FIRST programs are just shy of a two-hour drive away. C2 emphasizes machining and fabrication, hence the interest in FRC.
Renee did make a referral for us and we’re working on getting some virtual help set up. The team has only two mentors currently, so we’re looking for more in-person mentoring.
Thanks. I like the goal set. They’re working hard to be ready for our first event. They’ve been following the checklist and the rules so their robot should be compliant.
The District & Regional Events link is very useful. The schedule hasn’t been released yet for our first competition, so that page will prove useful in preparing.
As you describe the travel, I realize need to delegate that task to someone better with travel. I’m hoping to find a parent to accept the travel responsibilities.
We were able to get our team members registered and mentors installed in the FIRST system. Event registration was done by our former lead mentor.
Indeed. I have a request out to parents through the team members. I don’t have a great way to directly communicate with the parents, but hopefully, my request is relayed and someone steps up.
highly involved preparation for the awards. As long as judges can ask a group of your students questions (about how the robot works, how it was built, how the season went, and how the team works,) and get answers from them (not the mentors!), then you’re good for the pit interviews. They like to see multiple students answering them instead of the same one student answering everything. Don’t sweat the submitted awards this season.
ambitious robot mechanisms. (You can work on them at home, but keep your students mentally prepared to not use their dream mechanism on the robot at its first competition. The most important thing is driving!)
scouting and strategy. Your strategy should be to drive in all of your matches and contribute to the score. Any more specific than that, your more experienced alliance partners can help figure out. (If they’re rude about telling your team “you’re a kitbot. Keep out of our way, and don’t mess us up!”, talk to their coach about their unnecessary rudeness, and keep your own students’ spirits up.) If a team picks you to be on their alliance for tournament, your representative should say “yes”. If you’re lucky enough to be alliance captain and need to pick alliance partners, it’s pretty safe to just pick the highest-ranked team below you.
fancy pit setup. Make sure you have some kind of bag/box/cart to keep the essentials handy and mostly off the floor. A printed banner with your team name, number, logo, and sponsors looks good, but isn’t required. A massive collection of parts, materials, and tools is handy, but you can borrow from other teams by asking nicely. (It’s amazing what teams will offer at events.)
By “eschew”, I mean you, as head coach, shouldn’t focus on or worry about those things. If some of your students want to read through the awards, judging process, and best practices, and figure out talking points, that’s a great use of time during meetings! If somebody wants to understand how matches play out and what robots are good or not, let them watch matches with a clipboard or laptop and keep track! If any of your design/CAD/fabrication students have free time at the event, especially on check-in day, encourage them to go to other teams’ pits and ask them questions about their robot. (How does it work? How did they come up with the design? How did they get or make the parts? How did they program it?) If your students want to make decorations for the pit, that’s exactly the stuff the Team Spirit award is for! As coach, you can make sure that the essentials happen, and permit (and encourage!) your students to go above and beyond in whatever ways they want.
Something for next season: Team-parent communication (as a two-way street). Obviously you’d like it active now, but that’s going to be tough.
We do a few things to make that easier:
–Parent info nights in fall. Typically covering “what to expect” and that we need parental involvement.
–We collect parent info in the membership packet for each student–both for emergencies and to help us get info out.
–Parents have a dedicated Slack channel, but can access the other channels as needed. (Makes it easy to get parent attention sometimes…) If you already have a Slack or Discord or similar, you might be able to get that channel going now and send a written note back to the parents with how to sign up for [platform] and that you’d like them to join the parent channel.
–Emails are regularly sent out by our lead mentor (or a parent volunteer) for shop supervision/meal signups, and other important things like event plans.
The best-case scenario is that one parent steps up as kind of the “boss parent” who can get results with the other parents. If that doesn’t happen… sorry, it’s on the lead mentor(s).
I highly recommend that you collect good contact information for at least one parent or legal guardian of each of the students who is registered to your team. If nothing else, you’ll need that information if something happens to their kid while they are under your care.
Maybe you can get that information from the FIRST portal?
On my team, this is a required step for students to participate on the team. No parent/guardian contact info? We’ll nag you at team meetings, and you definitely won’t be going to events.
I also recommend having a basic email list or social media that you can use to send out announcements or pleas for help. (Edit: I see @EricH has expounded on the many means and uses of team/parent communication!)
On my team, this is a required step for students to participate on the team. No parent/guardian contact info? We’ll nag you at team meetings, and you definitely won’t be going to events.
Great advice. We’ll have to implement this policy and I’ll get the parents we’re missing into the database.
I want to stress this point slightly harder than the referenced post did. You must have 2 “primary contacts” registered in the FIRST Dashboard for your team. These two will have access to register the team for events, access to virtual kit vouchers and other codes, access to student/parent/mentor information (anyone affiliated with the team in that system), and will need to have completed the YPP training/background check process.
More importantly in the short term is that events have historically wanted a printout of your team roster from that system at registration when you first arrive to an event, for the purposes of proving that everyone on the team has Consent & Release forms signed. Now, FIRST has been trying to move away from paper copies of things like that, so maybe its not required anymore. I’ll let someone else provide a source if that’s the case. Just ensure SOMEONE has access to that system.
We’re from Manitowoc County, have a coalition building that we make available to other teams in need. We have a partial field & a number of teams you could work with. Our team, STEAMpunk 4531 would be more than happy to work with you, to assist you however you need. You can contact me at [email protected] We’ve had a team from Oshkosh that has come to use our field when it’s built, work with us.
Btw, we have a great programming mentor and captain that can help you out, too. Working on python and pid this year. Let us know if you can make it to Manitowoc, send me an email. Otherwise, we could find a way to be in contact with you, help you through what we can, what you need.
In reality, if you’re nearly done with a build derived from the Quokkas, the fact that you’re on Chief Delphi, and the fact that you were smart enough to build an Ri3D robot makes me think you’re in a better position than the majority of FRC teams. It may feel overwhelming, but it sounds like you’re doing a great job already.
A few things to not ignore - make sure you have enough batteries for your matches. Create a check list for packing and unpacking, create bins for spare parts for each subsystem of your bot, have a checklist for running a systems check on your robot before a match.