If you had a chance, when in the year would you choose to try to start another team? How would you do it?
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I would start a team after Champs because we can watch matches from all the weeks in quick sucession. We can also try to get sponsors early on so that we can stock up on parts for preseason testing/training. Our team does preseason testing/training and it helps tremendously.
My ideal:
Gather interest starting in December/Jan. Show off the kickoff for that year. Let some folks start to think about how cool it would be.
Take a group of students to go see a regional competition. Take them through the pits, have them meet the other teams and students. Have them talk to some rookie teams to see what they’re in for.
Gather sponsorship around this time. Lock some folks in by May, and start meeting over the summer with interested students. Get a workspace set up, start purchasing some basic tools and parts to play around with. Recruit mentors.
Do some recruiting toward August/September. As new students start the school year, get them intersted in the club. Host an open house, get contact info, get people to start showing up. Ideally, have your roster set around October-ish (but, of course, don’t turn down interested students later on if you still have the capacity).
Train as much as you can in the fall. Keep the excitement up. Get the team registered with FIRST. Order some parts if you have the budget.
Enjoy a bit of time off around Thanksgiving and Christmas. Do some team bonding activities if you have the time.
Attend your first kickoff the following year. Work hard, have fun, make an awesome robot.
Right about now, but to compete in the 2020 season. I’d work on gathering students and mentors to shadow another team for a season before trying to go it alone.
I changed thread titles to be more specific as “Spreading FRC” was a little generic.
To answer your question - I agree with Foss. Some of the best rookie teams I have seen were organized 1-2 seasons in advance and shadowed another FRC team, and built a robot to compete in the offseason, before going at it on their own.
These. Which is not to say a late-organized team can’t achieve great things (Exploding Bacon, how 'ya doing?), but if I’m asked to start a team again I’m not keen on attacking the next calendar year unless it’s before Championship.
Echoing Foss and Akash - 5012 got together in the fall of 2012 and coordinated with teams 399 and 585 to shadow them for the 2013 season complete with travel to two regional events. In the fall of 2013, we attended an offseason with 399’s robot.
Definitely helped the founding team get organized and figure out how the usual FIRST team processes(travel, purchasing, organization, etc) worked with the school’s processes. These things all prepared us very well for our rookie season in 2014.
I’d be happy to answer any specific questions on how this worked.
My thoughts are almost the same as gerthworm, except I would use the summer to build bot for an off-season event. Something basic in design and easy to build. We did a 6 week build of a simple gear bot when we started last year, since the GA off-season event is the end of Oct. We took it apart and bought a couple pieces of new alum to get back to a KOP drive train kit again. Also, the competition experience for the team and drivers was great.
Brian
To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t. I’d start with an FTC team and upgrade to FRC later if it made sense.
This is something that I’ve been thinking about too, and I’m gonna echo the people above. To me, the most powerful thing you can do to build excitement is to take people to a regional competition. Time and time again, the reaction I get is “I had no idea robotics was this big and intense”. Show them what they’re working toward. As a new team, connecting with and shadowing local teams is a great way to get those gears turning (heh).
I’m getting started on writing a presentation to give at the district of education meetings for my county and a few neighboring counties titled something along the lines of “Why FIRST is the Best and Why right now is the best time to start a team for the 2020 season.” I’ll be monitoring this thread closely.
I think this is a solid choice. FTC is way less risk and barriers to entry involved. The ideal FRC will be born from an FTC program that believes it has reached it’s peak potential.
There are plenty of FRC teams, including my own, that I think are better served by FTC.
It would be helpful to understand why you are looking to start another team and if you plan to support it long term or just get it started.
In our case, we added another school to our existing industry-based team. We decided to add the second school as a separate FRC team instead of having one robot between two schools. Both teams build out of the same shop with some shared resources.
The resources required to start a team can be overwhelming. I would get started now for a 2020 team. We started our second team mid-summer and had to scrabble to get resources in place plus recruit students.
A goal of adding another team is admirable, but be certain to consider the impact to your existing team.
David
I’d find an interested FTC team and show them the ropes at the beginning of summer. Then have them compete in an offseason late in the year with either a practice bot or better yet, an original robot developed by them with help.
Yeah, Bacon’s first meeting was about three weeks before kickoff 2006, and while it worked out for us (probably because we had initial registration funding secured and a fantastic group of mentors who had (mostly) all done FIRST for years before starting Bacon) I would not recommend it.
This x1000. It’s a pretty rare FRC program that is set up to be successful from the beginning. Starting from FTC is a far lower cost (in money, time, people) that serves as a fantastic jumping off point into the world of competitive robotics.
If I was for some reason hell-bent on starting an FRC team, I’d start an FTC team two-four years before I wanted the FRC team to exist, and make sure to expose the students and mentors in that program to FRC through regionals/offseasons to give them a better feel for what we’d be getting ourselves into.
In Minnesota and the Twin Cities area especially, I’d also be looking really hard at why we’d be looking at starting a new FRC team when we’re almost certainly less than a 10 minute drive from multiple teams.
The “drop people in the middle of the forest with half a map and no compass” approach to starting teams has produced some great teams, but it’s also produced a 50% attrition rate, and I would hope anyone intentionally starting a team would be thinking about how to set up a program so it can impact communities for many years to come.
Ok, Thanks for the infos.
Seems to be that a lot are saying start a FTC before upping to FRC. The thing is if we do a FTC team, they will not be able to get the help they would need. That team would be the only one around my area. The only teams participating in FIRST around here are 1665 and 6621. Mentors about to retire and i personally don’t like the fact that 6621 will have to find their way around if we die out. My dream is to study at RPI (40mins drive) and help out with mentoring the team to keep it going. But if the time comes and i don’t get to RPI, let’s just say we’re probably gonna sign off sooner.
I’m just now starting an FRC team in Indianapolis, and I could definetely agree that starting with ftc helps a lot. For us it got a bunch of students already involved so it was easy to start an FRC team with so many kids already on a robotics team. Granted they weren’t exactly doing FTC, rather they were doing Vex, which I’m sure gives the same effect
Now is the best time. **Later
** is worse, and you already missed before.
Seriously, getting “prepared” to start an FRC team is impossible, Kind of like getting ready to have your first child, you will never be truly ready! As long as you are mostly aware of the time and money requirements, have a couple of dedicated mentors, some basic tools and build space, then go for it.
As far as starting with FTC and then transitioning to FRC, I would love to see the statistics on that. I know FRC teams that also do FTC, but how many teams have started with FTC and actually transitioned to also do FRC?
I completely understand what Nick is stating here, yet I whole heartedly disagree.
FRC 4607 was the ‘drop people in the forest’ type of team. However, we did bring a small group of students to the MPLS Regionals in 2012 to test the water. We brought back 10 student hell-bent on creating a team for 2013. It was through many meetings with our regional director and our local community in the fall of 2012 that FRC 4607 was formed and funded as our local school district wanted nothing to do with (funding) robotics.
Now looking back, I think we hit while the iron was hot. We were fortunate to have a great group of seniors friends that wouldn’t quit - and we were backed by a handful of very aggressive juniors and sophomores. We also came to be right after one of the best games of FRC and in time for the best game FRC offered (2013’s Ultimate Ascent). You can look back on our history here on CD and on TBA if you need to help see how far we have come in a short six seasons.
If we asked these same kids to start a FTC team, we would not have enjoyed the success in the last few years. We would still be trying to catch the Iron Maidens, Rubies, Cat in the Hats, etc. of FTC.
So, if you are asking me - starting a FRC team in the spring is best.
My thoughts will reflect many in previous replies. Start getting the word out around the school in the Fall of the intent to form a FRC Team. In January, have the team still in its bud attend the kick-off so they can absord the buzz.
If possible, find a local team to buddy with.
During the Winter and Spring, start building foundation skills: team organization, strategizing, Computer Aided Design, Microcontrollers, Electronics, Pneumatics, Programming, fundraising, 3D printing, CNC machining, basic robotics, etc… In this first phase, try to work as much as possible with available resources, for example a FabLab or MakerSpace. The team should start seeking out mentors to help with all that learning and building.
If you have buddied up with a team, spend some time with them, learning how they work, helping them (extra resources are pretty much always welcome).
Follow what is happening during the season in the region/district. Start building the team’s “business plan”. Watch regional/district events on Twitch. Use The Blue Alliance, Chief Delphi, Youtube, social media and other internet resources to identify strong teams and reoccuring alliances and to study them. Definitely attend an event to go around the pits, watch qualification matches and the final round. Look at how rookie teams behave and perform. Look at the type of robots they build, assess what works well or not so well, start thinking about what fits your team. Also, start scoping out rookie resources, grants, subsidies, sponsorships that are available in your region/district, including those often made available by companies to children of their employees involved in a FIRST team.
Once school reconvenes for the Fall session, formally register the team, execute the business plan, including fundraising, launch an off-season robot design effort to start bringing everything together and plan to participate in one or more off-season events as an important shakedown prior the the start of the real season.
When January finally arrives, the team should be pretty ready to strike for one heck of a rookie season.