I haven’t seen any threads yet asking this directly, so I figured I’ll just ask myself:
What has your team been doing during the COVID-19 Season?
I saw quite a few teams designing face masks or similar stuff, and most of the teams at least having zoom calls regularly. Since my team really didn’t do a lot I’d like to compare hahaha.
I’m also interested in hearing about your “personal” projects aiding the team(for example one of our programmers is working on a new autonomous, and I’m working on fixing our 2018 robot).
Unofficially we are working on learning custom shuffleboard widgets and testing/simulation compatibility. We gained a few new members, so we’ll be working on training (software especially). Additionally there are rumors of Onshape next season.
On 2412 we’ve been doing our best to keep moving forward at a steady pace through all of this. We still meet as we normally would (albeit virtually), we still have daily CAD trainings, subteams are still working on their respective projects. We’re doing our best to take advantage of all the free time many of our students have now.
As for specific projects, we’ve mostly just been starting work on previously planned off-season projects, such as developing a new FLL pipeline program, among others. We’ve also been working with a number of other local teams to raise money for those who are food insecure during these challenging times.
We’re working on whatever we can on home (CAD, code) and deciding how recruitment and training will look like. As a community team we usually rely on ads/events at schools to recruit, but as they might be closed it’s harder. We’re also in a precarious situation with a lot of our team being seniors about to leave and cannot easily recruit during coronatimes. It’ll be fun!
My team recently changed leadership since seniors technically graduated last week. The new leadership is reflecting on the previous year, seeing how they can improve the team. Each officer has their own goal for the week (such as updating the website and working on a season recap). We are also working on improving lesson plans for next years students. The summer goal for the whole team is CADing up a new t-shirt cannon.
For 4575 we have been keeping pretty active. We started a Women in STEM presentation series with FTC 17009. We have a new woman come to speak every Thursday and answer questions about their lives.
We have also been planning our summer camp. We have to plan what we would do if we could hold an in-person camp and a virtual camp because we still have no clue what is going to happen this summer.
We have still been running our FLL programs virtually and even opened it up to new kids too. We are even partnering with FRC 2905 to have our curriculum translated into Turkish.
For the technical aspect many of our team members have been compiling their knowledge of programming, CAD, machining, or whatever they mainly work on into a manual to make sure we don’t loose any knowledge when someone graduates. It is also a great chance to make sure you really understand everything.
