i need some help finding a cheap kit to help start a team for our high school but all of this is coming out of my pocket so if someone has something it would be greatly appreciated
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This is how my team started (we bought the v5 clawbot kit and competed for our first year) , good luck!
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btw can you give me some tips on how to start and manage roles for each member
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Yeah sure, here’s what worked for me. (Full disclosure, I’m just a student and these are my experiences from a freshman newbie to being the president as a senior)
If you are starting a team from scratch, most people won’t know anything about robotics and you’ll have to manage all of these positions. Once you have some experienced upperclassmen and some newer underclassmen things become easier as the older students can do some of the teaching.
Each member doesn’t really need a role, just split them into groups of people with related interests.
What I did was just a quick show of hands but you could also do a quick google form and survey everyone about what they’re interested in (coding/building), if they have any prior experience, general stuff like that.
If you really want democratic/leadership positions these are the most useful:
- President/VP (pretty obvious, but because you’re a new team you should wait until the end of the year)
- Historian: Pretty important if your school wants club documentation/minutes, also make sure this person is in charge of the engineering notebook. Should be someone who can communicate well
- Secretary: manages funds, applies for grants, contacts possible sponsors, organizes fundraisers etc.
- Lead builder/coder: not democratically elected, but the student should be able to teach others if needed
Here’s my experience and general advice, as jumpstarting the club at my school after a pandemic was an interesting experience.
On my team, I am the only person (including my coach) who is knowledgeable enough to teach others (coding, building, pretty much everything). If you’re the only one with knowledge in both it can be very difficult to manage the builder group and the coders group at the same time.
What I did to mitigate this was to establish certain days. Ex. tuesday is only coding lectures, thursday is only building lectures, and wednesday is group work with no lectures (if you have a question ask people around you, then come to me). This way I’m not pulled in 2 opposite directions at once, and I can teach people more efficiently.
If you have any other questions, feel free to ask. Some other technical resources I found helpful:
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