Its the start of the new school year and we have been busy already. We left no break for our returning members and kicked off the first week of school with a returning member only meeting. We spent most of the time talking about our summer, the things we did and bonding as a team. Then the students hung up a bunch of recruitment posters advertising the new member meeting. We talked briefly about a few of the things that we are going to be doing better this year.

Some of the Items are:

• Better Task Generation on Students
• Buddy Program for New Students
• Accurate Field Elements
• Swerve

One of the things we plan to do better is the engineering notebook, we had a good start last year but fell off about mid season. This year we are going to keep better documentation and make it more of a priority. Along the same theme we are going to emphasize the importance of the weekly recap meetings that the sub team leads give every Tuesday. We’ll also implement a tighter feedback loop to ensure the quality of our recap meetings remain high through out the season.

Another big item that we aim to fix during the off season is to have a functioning drive base, electronics panel, and working path generation/following before the season starts. Looking back at last year we spent the first two weeks of the season working on a drive base. We know the game will require a drive base. The game might not be best suited for swerve drive and we might use a west coast tank drive again, and that’s okay.

We talked at the mentor meeting about this our current idea of improving student task generation. At the start of a project/subsystem/large the first step is to sit as a group with a mentor leading a discussion about how we should break out the steps and smaller individual pieces. The idea is that students will see the process and learn and we will start having the students lead the task break down discussions as the season goes on. 

New Member Meeting

The second week school we jumped into action with the new member meeting. This year I slimmed down the power point and removed all of the boring stuff. Most of the boring stuff is information that the students will learn in the coming weeks, and isn’t critical for them to decide if they like the thought of robotics and want to try it out.

One of the key things that was focused on this year was the expectations of our robotics students. We emphasized that we are here to be actively engaged and working on robotics, and the time commitment of robotics meeting(and coming to 80% of the meetings). Our new member meeting had 24 excited new students and a few of them will probably join the Vex team instead of FRC, I think we should pick up another 15ish students. That would put us around 50 students.

The next few weeks will be filled with some paper work, safety meetings and then we dive into fall training. This year we cut the total time spent in rotations by half. Students will now only spend 4 weeks doing rotations. In addition returning members will not being doing rotations instead they will be working on sub team specific fall training activities. One of the major things we are working on this off season is adopting swerve. We aim to have it working and ready to go before kick off.