Recruiting for the Team

    I spent this past week recruiting for our FTC team.  We already have an FRC (First Robotics Challenge) team at our school, which in our case caters to the older students; so, although I am an 11th and 12th grade math teacher, I am recruiting students from the 7th - 9th grades.  My initial visits to the middle school classrooms yielded a list of about 40 students who said they were interested.  However, it was too much to expect them to pick up the application for the after-school program from the front office, fill it out, and return it to the school with $15.00 and a parent's signature.  A few days later, I made another trip to their classes to personally place applications in the hands of interested students.  Then, I made another trip and showed a video of some FTC clubs in action, giving out more applications to students whose interest was rekindled.  Finally, I made calls home to some of the most likely candidates.
    I will find out how successful my recruiting drive worked on Monday, as that will be our official first meeting (Wednesday night of last week was canceled because of a previously scheduled "Back to School Night" for parents to come in and meet teachers).   It looks like it will be several weeks before we find out about funding, and will be able to order our parts, so we will begin this week with some lessons from other robot curricula I have taught.  We will also view some introductory videos this week, and learn a little about programming.

FTC Kickoff Event Day!

    Today was the day when USFirst revealed the description and rules for this season's FTC challenge, and it looks like it will be great fun. I posted the kickoff video from the USFirst website elsewhere in this blog, but here is a link to the video:  2014-2015 FTC kickoff video .  It involves teams working in pairs to have their robots pick up plastic balls of different sizes and place them into giant beakers, then push those beakers into "parking areas."  The good news for a rookie team like mine, is that more experienced teams will have to alter their current robots a good bit in order to make them better suited for this season's challenge.