One of the projects some students and mentors on our team plan to do is try to radically improve our approach to organizing and propagating team knowledge. The current approach each year is to dust off, update, and share with the team a fairly disorganized set of teaching presentations, touch on key resources from the FRC community, and hold a few hands on sessions for certain things like prototyping practice. We don’t run in the summer (other than isolated mentor-student projects) due to school district constraints, so we have that momentum lag each year unfortunately.
What we need in my opinion is a framework (or set of interconnected frameworks) that will allow us to sustain what we already know, prioritize the next set of capabilities we want, and more deliberately grow our students’ and mentors’ abilities.
Regarding the individual student/mentor knowledge part, I saw Michael C. from 1678 share their approach of each student having a tracking sheet for what they know and what they still have the opportunity to learn (different lists by sub-team). It’s sort of like saying “An L1 mechanic has trained and demonstrated they can do A, B, & C” and those things are discretely tracked and checked off as they’re completed. And for L2, L3, etc. mechanic levels there are increasingly advanced and challenging competencies to achieve. I I think we’re likely to try to implement something like that.
For managing and growing team-level knowledge (which clearly would need to be connected to the individual level described above), we’re still looking around. I’ve seen Wikis, file collections, and other structures. We’d like to find something that really let’s us be honest with ourselves about what we already know & can do, how we’re constrained with little opportunity to change (for us, we have time constraints from the district), and what our top opportunities to grow and improve are so we can spend energy in a focused, intentional way.
Does anyone have team well-established frameworks/approaches like I’m describing that you’re willing to share?
Thanks in advance & good luck the rest of the season!
Chris