Last year we did about two months of fall training rotations, where each meeting a group of 4-5 students learned about a different task in FRC. This year we have cut down the number of rotations and we will be done with them in a month. We trimmed out some subjects that we felt new members wouldn’t get the full value out of at the start of their robotics journey.

An asterisk next to the rotation name indicates a full team session instead of small group

We slimmed the list of training by cutting, combining, or postponing lessons(to early December), and we will complete fall training in a month this year.

Student Teachings

Our returning students who got to experience our first fall training last year are helping run some of our trainings this year. This is an important step to scaling our team and it encourages growth of our students. Four out of the ten rotations are student lead and they have been going great so far!

By starting the pipeline of students teaching students, we free up mentor time. This allows the mentors to teach more advanced topics to other students. Over time this will increase our capabilities and in theory we should be able to reach more students and more advanced topics.

Postponed and Cut Topics

We decided to cut machining from the fall rotations because we do not think we are able to cover enough about machining in a single 2 hour lesson. The Basic manufacturing course will cover hand tools, the drill press, chop saw, and table saw basics. It will also provide a brief overview of machining at the end of the lesson. This will hopefully provide enough information to students to decide if they are interested in being on the manufacturing sub team.

The other big items that got postponed are FRC Design, and Game History. These were postponed to early December. Hopefully new robotics members will have a better understanding of FRC by then and will get more out of the talks. Also being closer to kick off will hopefully allow them to remember more of the information when they need it.

New Members

This year our team has grown to 52 members, this has been the result of a two to three year effort to increase the number and diversity of the students we reach. During 2021 covid significantly affected our ability to recruit and retain members. This has lead to our team being low year of experience heavy. This is fine, last year was even more imbalanced and we did good.

We are coming up to the end of our first set of four rotations, which means our large first information meeting where we aim to gather a large group of new members happened three weeks ago. Up until late December we will accept new members onto the team. So we put out some special “Missed our Info Meeting” posters encouraging students to drop by and join still. These must be working well because the past two weeks of meetings we have had 2 – 4 new members every day.