Hi everyone! I was curious to how other teams spend their time during the off-season. We’ve all decided that we want to keep having meetings, but aren’t really sure of what we should do exactly, any ideas?
Outreach, outreach and more outreach! From running FLL tournaments to doing community events, outreach is a huge part of my team’s offseason. In addition we also do some testing and software development (mechanism prototypes, vision etc.) to maybe use during competition season.
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Our team typically does as much outreach in our community as possible during the summer months. Once the students are back in school we do some basic “on boarding” meetings to try and ramp students up before build season.
When determining what to focus on in the off-season it’s probably a good idea to outline your team goals and choose something that aligns with them. Do you wish to grow your involvement in the community? Do you wish to improve your competitive prowess? Do you wish to simply work on cool projects to inspire the students?
Once you have a goal, choosing projects or activities to work towards is much easier. 
So what are your goals? Either as a team or personal?
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Meeting during the off-season is a great way to not only get a lot done - but to learn a ton. While my team doesn’t meet as much as I would like to in the off-season, I personally have taken advantage of the free time I now have.
From a design perspective, looking at past games and elite teams can extensively grow your knowledge on subsystems that you may find yourself using one day (FRC games are very repeatable in certain aspects). Some projects I’m planning on completing this off-season are: sideways elevator CAD, catapult CAD (for 2016), and messing around with swerve drive.
If your team is going to any offseason events, I recommend replacing/fixing any broken parts on your robot or even add some helpful mechanisms to help you do better.
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Team 1425 is doing a lot this off-season. Our biggest project is that we are building a swerve powered by 8 neos. To improve our auto modes, we will be working on our path following to allow different speeds at different spots along the path as well as improving our vision system. We are also experimenting with blue nitrile wheels on the swerve robot. Our mechanical sub team will also be experimenting with a new velox 5050 router that we will be getting in about 3 weeks. This will help make a lot of parts for the swerve and we plan to use it extensively during build season to speed up the building of the robot. In addition to all these plans to help the team, we are also doing a lot more fundraising and recuruiting since a lot of our sponsorships have dried up and within the past 3 years we have gone from ~60 students to ~20.
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Currently one of our goals is to get more involved with our community, we’ve recently had great success going to a local elementary school and showing off our robot to the kids. Although now since everyone’s out of school we aren’t sure of what to do next. Should we possibly try holding an event of our own?
Sure! If you’ve set your sights on more community involvement you could try to stage some kind of open house to get the community to visit you. However if you’re just starting out that might be tough. What our team has had great success with is partnering with already happening events in the community and setting up a booth to run our robots around at and talk with the public. Doing a couple of events that way got us out into the community and from there the requests asking us to participate in other events just started to flood in. We now have a couple of reoccurring events we do every year as well as picking up additional ones here and there.
So if you plan to keep meeting during the off-season and your goal is to get involved in the community. I would suggest taking the time at these meetings to plan and reach out to events in the community explaining what you are, what you do and that you’d like to get involved. And then brainstorm how you’d like to present yourselves in public. Do you need some graphics and banners made up? Perhaps some fliers to handout? What do you want to be telling people about your team when they ask?
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It really depends on what your interest is.
We attend 2 off-season events. One we host or assist. ( Hosting a event is a massive undertaking! And probably would not recommend it). Often times we rebuild or modify our robots for these events.
In the past we have been part of parades, had a booth at the county Fair, made custom pits for competition, hosting a 2 day programming camp, now we are working on custom robot carts.
Figure out what the students want to do and try to allow for the time required.
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The off-season is a great time to do some continuous improvement projects! These can range from small regular student driven point kaizens, to high level process improvement projects driven by student leaders.
Because you have a lot of time to think and discuss, off-season meetings give you room to find the root cause of systemic problems that slow your build season down. You can use various lean management tools such as Hoshin Kanri, A3 problem solving, and Value Stream Mapping to discover where your team has room to get better and how to redesign your process to build more competative robots.
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Importantly, there are six other teams in Augusta. Here in the Waterloo region, we do group demos for larger outreach events. While it might not be the best for recruitment (although it can be if you spin it right, and have a system for referring students to other teams). Having one robot is great for “captive audiences” but to capture the attention of passerby, nothing can beat multiple robots! It also allows for looooong demos (we’ve gone over six hours straight) because it’s very unlikely that all robots will need a battery change or maintenance at once.
Finally, on the softer side of things, it’s hard to get a bunch of kids together over the summer, and it gets lonely at demos if you only have a couple of people there at a given time. It’s a lot easier to spend hours at a demo if you have friendly people from other teams to talk to during lulls in traffic.
For anybody looking for teams near them, FIRST allows you to search by location on their site
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Some of us older students are redoing our robot for Kettering Kickoff, and the underclassmen are working with seventh and eighth graders on NRC-based projects to build skills.
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