I just wanted to know what teams meet in the offseason/during the summer when school’s out, and what they do and how many members on average show up. Our team was considering having meetings in the summer but we weren’t sure what we should try to do.
We give the new members a crash (sometimes literally) course in FIRST and prepare for IRI. We try to take as many of the new team members as possible. We have good participation and it gives them a vision of what they will be working so hard toward come Jan.
We haven’t had any “off-season” meetings, but I hear some teams fund-raise, attend other non-FIRST events, community service, etc. It’s also a good time to train your new members and to exercise teamwork skills.
As for how many attend, it depends on their summer schedules or commitments. Have a survey between the members, who would want to attend, and what they’d want to do.
116 has officer/mentor meetings during the summer to plan for the next season. Additionally they meet to repair and prepare the robot and team for any off-season competitions, as well as work on any off-season projects or prototyping. Depending on the nature of the meeting, attendance ranges from just a few (~4) to around a dozen.
We are a Vex team, so this might not apply (though I know many FRC teams use Vex for prototyping). We typically meet about 4-5 times through the summer for 3 - 6 hours at a stretch, and an average of 5 of our 7 members show up at a time. We try out original designs and also look for designs on the internet and try to reconstruct those. Sometimes, when we’re really on top of things, they actually get documented (like here).
Other times, we’ll invite other teams from out of town to join us, as described in post 18 of the Vex Summer Projects thread. When we do this, the mentors try to create a short list of possible projects that would be practical for the allotted time, and once everyone is together, the teams decide what they want to build and how they want to subdivide the tasks.
Summer is a really good time for everyone to get in their share of building. During build season, things are so hectic that sometimes the less experienced builders don’t get as much of a chance, since we’re trying to get everything done as quickly as possible.
Our team meets weekly in addition to numerous demos, fundraisers, and community service scattered throughout the summer. As for attendance, we usually get a dozen or two depending on the day and time. Hopefully that number will be even greater this year since we recruited 18 new students this year.
Last year we got in a couple of meetings a week. On average maybe seven or eight students a meeting? We had build sessions for the Cal Games and C class, taught by two awesome parents. A couple of years ago we had a Solidworks class, but I don’t know how many people showed up to that. Summer is an excellent time to teach rookies and recruits as well as do Outreach. Since our high school gets out for summer a few days before the local feeder middle schools, the first few days of a blessed lack of school are spent with the robot, friends and little kids. What could be more fun?
Off-topic note: I always thought calling middle schools “feeder schools” sounded like freshmen were those little feeder goldfish that people buy to feed to their bigger, carnivorous fish. Compare carnivorous fish to FIRST, gobbling up the free time of freshmen and recruits voraciously… Soon those little newbies will be completely consumed into the Chief Delphi community of FIRST!
We meet once a week for about 3 hours a meeting. We work on various improvements to last years robot or special projects. This summer i think we are going to prototype a Mecanum drive train.
We meet every other week in our founding sponsor’s cafeteria (Thanks GE Healthcare! Our regular Jupiter High School workspace is not accessible). Generally the group consists of parent-mentors & students; our one teacher often travels in the summer.
Agenda items include scheduling the majority of our community outreach activities, fundraising (we hold carwashes in GE’s parking lot), team organization issues and social/team building events (robot obstacle course driving, etc.) We built a t-shirt canon for our 2005 robot last summer. Since we do not have any machine shop access, our build type activities are limited to what can be done in a member’s garage.
We remove robots & pit items we know we’ll need each summer from Jupiter High; this involves good organization & a tracking system. MARS usually attends one off season robot competition (Mission Mayhem) & summer meetings help us to be prepared.