Things are coming along again, schools are meeting in person again and we are able to start meeting in person again. Coming into the start of the school year we have 8 returning members, we have a ton of recruiting to bump this number up! We lead a multi-pronged approach to recruiting this year, we hung approximately 150 fliers (twice) to recruit for our initial meeting and then again for the start of our training sessions(more on that later). Fliers specific to each department ,business, programming, CAD, and manufacturing, were created and hung in the corresponding parts of the school. We also had our teacher mentors recruit heavily from their classes. In addition we had two days where we brought our 2020 robot to the cafeteria to show off.

The results from our efforts showed at our first information meeting, we had approximately 35 new students attend. This meeting covered the two robotics programs our team runs. About 25 of the students are planning on participating in FRC, so we should have enough students if we can keep them engaged, having fun and coming back.

Some of our returning members have never had the chance to attend competition, or attend meetings in person. We have some gaps in knowledge about FRC and our team. Combine this with our large number of new members we decided to run an all team training sessions. The idea of one session is to highlight an area of interest, or give a glimpse of what FRC is about. In total we have 15 different topics we are covering, 3 of these were given to the entire team at once. The rest of the topics are being taught in small groups of students with the students moving onto a new topic every day. This should hopefully give each student the chance to experience all of our departments and allow them to make a better guided choice in which department to join.

• Safety
• Team Building
• Game History
• Electronics
• CAD
• FRC Design
• Prototyping
• Programming
• Driving
• Carpentry
• Machining
• Pneumatics
• FRC Culture
• Media
• Graphic Design

We are currently meeting twice a week so we will complete our training sessions midway through October. Then we will start our department specific fall training. Which will probably go through until winter break.

A few of the mentors(including me) didn’t have a training session for our first rotation so we have been cleaning and organizing the closet. In the past the team hasn’t been great at keeping things clean and organized we are making a push this year to change that. Our shop has also been in a state of constant rearrangement for the past two years which hasn’t helped keep things organized and clean. The shop arrangement is approaching a usable state with no upcoming rearrangements (fingers crossed). The team managed to acquire a rather impressive fiber laser this year. More on that at a later time.

Next week I am planning on getting our 2015 robot into a working state so it can be used for the driving section. It should be mechanically functioning it is just missing code to make it work. I’m also trying to find a good routine for driver practice. Maybe that will be the focus of the next post.