Hello everybody.
Last year my boy entered school team for VEXIQ. He is very into all things robotics, RC and programming, so quickly got the hang of it, and helped designed a good robot to eventually win the Michigan state finals. Unfortunately the other members of the team had 0 interest in the whole thing and were there just because parents signed them up. It was very frustrating and counterproductive.
So this year we created an independent team to be able to create the robot we want, and not having to babysit teammates who don’t want to be there. We started the design the moment we returned from the Worlds, and it was tonns of very educational fun for him for the whole summer.
But… my plan on my son finding the 2nd driver among his friends - failed completely. Without parent’s push - nobody is interested in anything else other than playing games in front of the TV. And when parents hear about driving to the events for 2 hours - that’s that. And most middle school events this year are 2 hours from us.
So how do I find independent parents with kids interested in VEX? Are there any other forums like this one? Especially focused on the state of Michigan? Any other ideas how to find those really interested in the robotics?
Tough question, particularly since most middle-school teams are probably already formed. You might check around to other schools that have Vex IQ programs. One way is to go to https://www.robotevents.com/, select IQ, select Michigan and check the resulting listing of the various Middle school events,. For each event, you can list the Teams that have signed up to see what schools have VEX IQ programs. You might then try to call each school and talk to the faculty person responsible for Vex. They may know someone that really wants to do Vex but, for some reason, is not on a team. They may also know some of the other middle school teachers around Michigan that you might call. Similarly, you could take to the coordinators of each even to see if they are aware of someone. Again, you are getting a late start, plus you may have some catching up to do with respect to team member contributions, Notebook, etc. You may also want to consider finding more that “the 2nd driver” because conflicts arise that might prevent one driver from attending. You also probably need to think about team roles pre the rules, etc.
Reach out to Brandi Bolinger who is the REC Foundation Team Engagement Manager (TEM) for Michigan. She may be able to help connect you to other interested students or at least area programs.
As the robot is designed, built and programmed, the contributions of each member of a team are generally detailed chronologically in the team’s Engineering Notebook. My understanding is that your son has done a fair amount of work to date which may already be detailed in an Engineering Notebook, so adding team members now would likely require some additional work to define new team members’ roles going forward. Since many (most?) teams generally continue to improve and/or totally revise their robots during a competition season, the new team members’ roles would need to be so documented.
Silly me I was thinking it’s something about money