FIRST wants us to start 20 new teams in the west Texas, Lubbock area. Including Amarillo and El Paso. AND they are starting a new Lubbock Regional this year. Everything is pretty much set to do this, we have students ready to go. But no mentors.
We have been recruiting college students at Texas Tech University to be mentors, but we need more. If anyone out in that area would be interested in being a mentor for a rookie team, or know of anyone (FIRST alumni/mentors/professional engineers) that would be, please let us know.
Y’all have some serious work cut out for you guys. At major risk of self promotion…
Here is what we did here in Georgia the past year or so. At the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year Georgia had 18 FRC rookie teams on the taxiway getting ready to take off. Pretty scary.
About 6 rookies got partnered with a veteran team or went solo. The other 12 attended workshops, hand on build sessions, and other support activities at the Kell Robotics Innovation Center, aka the ‘IC’. We didn’t take occupancy of the ‘IC’ until November 1st and held our 1st training sessions in December.
Mentors taught about 1/3 of the material and our team students about 2/3.
You need to get a good information kit out to the HR department of companies in the area and ask for mentors.
Recruit students to teach essentials of whatever topic is needed. Create a cascade of mentorship. Adult mentors–>student mentors–>rookies… You might not have a choice.
We do training sessions by appointment. We quickly evaluate the rookies and quickly adapt the training session to their need, the ability, and where we are on the calendar. Some groups will come in regularly and train over months. Some have had to come in and do a crash build. Trainers have to walk a fine line and manage time and resources and try to help the rookies get a toehold and get excited about what they are doing.
Find adult mentors to keep in contact and monitor all rookies. During the build season at the end of week two some MUST do a site visit with the team. I can tell you horror stories about what rookie teams have been doing that have not properly been monitored.
Call a mentor / coach meeting. For example, we recently held the GeorgiaFIRST MAC meeting, the Mentor Advisory Conference. We held it at a conference center at Kennesaw State University. After opening the meeting ask the crowd for concerns and questions and wrote them on the board. We had a dozen or so and I facilitated a very interactive guided discussion of the crowd… Great interaction between rookie and veteran mentors. Very productive format. It is very important to train mentors. They need to understand the schedule of the year, how they can help, and frankly will need some guidance to help them get into a mode where they are working with high school students that have not so much knowledge.
This past weekend we had training happen at two sites. In the morning we were at the GeorgiaFIRST full size official FRC field. It is hosted at the Walton Robotics site. There we had rookies tryout driving this pasts years robots that were on the field. Then we went to lunch and then to the Kell ‘IC’. All afternoon was basic training. We covered the competition, pit setup, judging, programming, mechanical design, and more. We have a permanent ‘pit’ setup at the IC. Between experiencing the field at the Walton site, the pit at the ‘IC’, and a lot of training, these rookies are making some progress. These rookies will be in the ‘IC’ for many more sessions.
Train, Train, Train. We have been training rookies all this past summer and will be doing more from here to the competition. Training will be uneven across teams. If you can figure out how to even it up, go for it. If you can create opportunities to train teams, people will take advantage of that 12 months a year.
Training needs to get them excited early. If on the 1st day a rookie can create a Java linetracker project, have them add two joysticks and tankdrive, download it and go, that will fire them up. Understanding will come later.
Information push to the teams - a) Chiefdelphi is a good forum for getting quick answers to problems, not too good for quickly getting to organized information about ‘standard topics’. b) We created the www.the-innovation-center.org website to help teams get fast answers to training and supplier questions. It is NOT a forum but hopefully an evolving catalog of easy to access useful information. You are not going to have time to answer the same supplier and training questions for 20 teams, over and over. We hope the ‘IC’ website will be useful. We will see. If you know of information that should be there, let me know.
Find some robots to help do the training with. Get some teams to collaborate. Fortunately we have a fleet of 7 cRio based systems so we can have multiple parallel breakout groups. ‘Smaller class’ size = ( number of students ) / robot.
Creating a mentor training/conference will take the resources of several mentors and some promotion and coordination from your Regional Director.
If the rest of the country is anything like Georgia, getting the word out about FIRST isn’t the big issue anymore. Responding to the growth is the real challenge.
I would recommend getting in touch with the Oklahoma regional director. They started with a huge number of rookie teams a few years ago. I know they have kit bot build on kickoff.
Team 2468 will do some mentoring through Skype and Facetime if you would like. We are planning on attending the Lubbock Regional as our first registration.
Please DM message if you are interested in some preseason calls or online conferences.
Know a few people from up in the area (our team is from Fort Worth). Will try to persuade them to get involved, which many of them already seem to be doing. Several very smart engineers up there which would make great mentors.
Also looking forward to the Lubbock regional. Hope to raise enough funds to attend it this year! Brand new and always will be exciting!
Only 20? What a lightweight. But seriously, I guess everything is bigger in Texas, including aspirations for FRC.
I know VirginiaFIRST and other organizations try to recruit universities to help with the program, and in turn advertise how much the University loves FIRST. I assume there will be a kickoff event in Lubbock, Texas at TTU. If you could secure some large, general purpose work area for all of the rookies to meet at the University until school is back in session, you could train in weekends before kickoff, and help with kitbot demonstrations and large fundamentals of strategy and design sessions in this area weekends after kickoff until students come back to move in. I imagine a combination of a lecture hall and common area for discussion/hand work could provide a large enough space to hold 20 teams. After that I guess you could assign alumni mentors interested in building a resume to teams that request one, and maybe try to do telementoring with some of the bigger teams in the state, even if they are far away.
Good luck guys. I can’t really wrap my head around 20 rookie teams in one metro area just coming into existence.
Try reaching out to the Minnesota regional director. We grew by leaps and bounds a few years ago. If I remember right, there was 1 team 7 years ago, then around 20 teams 6 years ago, then over 40, then over 100 in the state. We’re up over 150, and I think this year we might finally have more FRC teams than high school boys hockey teams in the state (we missed the mark by only a couple last year!) It really was explosive growth, and somehow the mentorship in the area managed to almost keep pace with the need. But then again, I’ve only met a couple of teams who have said they didn’t want more mentors
That is the problem. If you don’t lay a good foundation what was the point. The goal should be to start a team that thrives has money that is not nasa and starts mentoring other teams in 3 to 4 years not hoping they do not die off.
Hey guys…
I’ve got a question about my Vex robot, but this site is totally confusing me! Sorry to post in an unrelated thread, but can someone please tell me how to post my own question thread? Thank you to whoever helps!
Ed Barker nailed it! That’s what we did in DC for 2009 and it worked. Follow up the support with competition-day support and you’re golden.
Longer-term, find companies that are willing to invest employee time into the 20 teams. Setup recruitment demonstrations at manufacturing plants and software/design tech firms. Make sure the lead of each team knows that the most important thing to remember about the first year is to make it to the second year (and have some fun).
From my discussions with 1817, it’s not that they are trying to start these teams. 1817, as the only successfully established FIRST team for the area, is being asked to help support these new teams that HQ/regional leadership wants to start.
Since the University is one of the major sponsors of 1817 the people are one in the same with the people doing the work to prepare for adding a new regional.
I concur that organic growth is generally best, but sometimes you need a kick in the pants to get things rolling. At the very least the best case would be to only have as many of these seed rookies as you have veteran teams to support them, but like I said 1817 is pretty much all there is in Lubbock and even up to a 200+ mile radius. It’s very big and pretty empty out there (no offense to the lubbockites out there).
1817 has students from all the schools in the Lubbock area, so it will be interesting to see what happens to their student base as more teams are added into the local schools.
I’m concerned about the potential number of teams for the Hub City Regional in Lubbock, Texas.
Why not Austin instead of Lubbock ?
I don’t see the population density working for a Lubbock regional
You have already received some good advice and a few tales of similar challenges. Let me add that my family lives in Lubbock and nearby areas in West Texas. I’ve had the pleasure of working with team 1817 a number of times over the last few years and have noticed capable teams from Midland, Del Rio, and even Van Horn. I hope that you are able to arrange for one or more kick-off builds, and if so, I’d love to help. I suspect that a number of NI engineers can assist as well. Unfortunately, the eight hour drive each way means we cannot be primary mentors.
Please contact me with details and any other issues you think we may be able to assist with.
As for finding mentors, I"m not sure what you’ve tried, but there are tons of energy companies, oil and wind, and their engineers are distributed throughout the region. Personally, one of the most inspiring technical people I grew up with was a shade-tree mechanic and responsible for keeping the local cotton gin operating. He certainly wasn’t a trained engineer, but with the Chilton manual for any automobile ever made, he could work miracles and simultaneously explain what was wrong and how to keep it from happening again. My point is that technical inspiration doesn’t have to come solely from college students or professional engineers, especially when you are looking to start that many teams.
I belive this has to do with the eventual change over to the district model in the future. They need a good distribution of teams/events to make it work. That being said I wouldn’t be suprised to see an austin district when the change is made.
Also 1817 is basically out there all by themselves, and I really doubt that there will be alot of quality teams at that event especally if they have tasked a college supported team to found them. That model does not work, and while you may see 20 new kitbot teams this year, I bet only ~10 survive into year 3 (this due to the assumption for regional earmarked 2 year grants).
