Seeking Advice for Our First In-Person Kickoff Event

FIRST General Forum
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Hi CD, this year we are planning to host a kickoff for the first time in person. In the past, we used Zoom or Discord, but this time we will be hosting a physical kickoff. We’ll have parents, students, and mentors from our team, as well as mentors and students from another team. I’ve checked other threads about this topic, but we’re feeling a bit nervous since we’ve invited parents too.

So far:

We’ve arranged the school network and other technical equipment.

We have two conference halls, so everything is redundant in case of technical failures.

Students will arrive about 30-45 minutes early. (Kickoff is at 8 PM local time, so we don’t want to take up too much of their time.)

We’ve prepared the workshop in case parents want to tour it.

Is there anything we’re missing? Any advice on what details we should focus on?

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Some potential ideas:

  • Having a school laptop cart or telling students to bring laptops to look over the new game manual.
  • Inviting some alumni and parents to come help build the new field elements. It helps makes sure the team can focus on learning the new game instead of worrying about wood working.
  • Asking for some donation of snacks and water specifically for kickoff.
  • Printing out a “kickoff day” worksheet for students to use and start thinking about game manual rules. Ex: FRC 2791 Kickoff Worksheet 2020.pdf (56.7 KB)

I think this CD post has some good knowledge about various teams kickoff schedules.

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We recently posted our resources for our 2025 kickoff in this OA post:

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I would suggest having some snacks, probably of the dessert variety, and drinks for attendees. Because you’re getting the Kickoff stream late in the day, I’d pretty much watch it, get the Manual unlock code, and send everyone home to read the Manual (and for the field builders, the field drawings for both normal and team-style elements) as it’ll be close to 10 PM for you guys. If the Kit has arrived, inventory it right away; otherwise that can wait.

1197 (getting the game at 9 AM local time) does breakfast-type snacks, and one mentor (me) visits the local Kit delivery point for Kickoff then joins the team later. We then go through strategy and initial field build work before shutting down for the day around 4 or 5 PM.

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We like to bust the students into small groups for review and brainstorming. We use several different classrooms for these breakout sessions. I’m old school and prefer white boards or some equivalent writing down ideas and questions. Each small group has a scribe that uses a shared Google docs to document the ideas in a central space. You may need keys and permission to use these classrooms.

The two conference halls should work but may lack writing surfaces. I’ve also used flip charts or gaint post-it notes in a pinch.

Have fun!

David

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Here’s 7525’s plan this year.

I specifically want to call out Shelby’s tremendous presentation on running a good kickoff. I also found 6328’s kickoff materials insightful.

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I would recommend for the first day of kickoff:

  1. getting notebooks and pencils/pens/highlighters to take and capture notes/ideas and the like.
  2. have printers available to make paper copies of the manuals.
  3. break students up into groups to each read a section of the rules, then present it, then have them read through it all again in its entirety.
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If you have the space, get some masking/painters tape and mark off a full/half size field to get a real feel for game field.

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Thank you everyone, it went better than we expected.
This year kickoff hype of team was more than we have ever seen. We followed most of your advices.

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