there have been posts about team organizations, and i noticed that majority of the school have resources (tools, work rooms, equipment, etc.). and well… i was wondering if there are any schools out there that don’t have access to these things.
here’s my situation. i go to an all girls school, so my campus doesn’t have the facilities to build a robot, or anything for that matter. we had to work in the science lab and a lot of the teachers got mad at us for taking up so much room and leaving a mess after the weekend. our engineer did all the metal work that had to be done. but sadly he’s leaving us so we have no means of working with parts next year. since we didn’t have proper equipment, our robot looked rather crude. ableit, it was an improvement to our robot the year before. most of the tools we did use belonged to him. and over the summer our school is going to begin it’s remodeling project. so lots of things are going to be moved around over the school year. it’s too bad they didn’t plan on adding a workshop area. that would benifit us a lot.
so i was wondering if anyone has a situation similar to ours, where there are no personal equipment and/or facilities to work in. do you make use of other places? borrow tools? hope your engineers can do it? suggestions? we need help for next year, especially since our engineer is leaving and our team moderator is leaving as well. i’m trying to help organize the team as best as i can before the end of the school year.
Well… my team essentially works in a wood shop, though we use metal. We have a bunch of team tools we bought with some of our budget, but our engineers bring a lot of their own tools as well as the other adults. We have our own room in the school inbetween two tech rooms. While its not the biggest space, its a space thats our own. We can’t use it to work in really, its just our storage space. We have guys at the machine shops we use that to all our metal crafting. They’re AWESOME… they do so much for us. But our engineers do most of the hard stuff… Next year… talk to your sponsors… if you have an industrial sponsor… maybe they have space open at their shop or HQ? Ask local businesses if they have extra space… (construction places, etc… don’t ask a bakery for space… heh). Or, ask another school, then get their school involved too… get double points. Good Luck!!
We have no room at school. We have a building program going on and when it is done we will still not have enough space. 
We had someone donate space for us to use this year and it worked out very well but we had to give it back. We are contacting all sorts of companies looking for a space next year. I envy teams who are sponsored by companies that have space to dedicate to FIRST 365 days a year.