Hi guys, a while back, there was an article writen about a competition at our school for the news paper. http://www.myupperchesapeake.com/news/article_6cdb9d36-6428-11e2-9864-0019bb2963f4.html
How can we better inform the general public about vex robotics, or robotics in general? It would seem that, even after extensive interviews, the authors didn’t really understand what was happening.
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Our team does a lot of public outreach, although we have a long way to go before everyone truly understands what VEX is.
First of all, we have a facebook page to keep friends updated about our team. We post pictures and statuses and we all invite people to like the page and follow our updates. We also demonstrate at school and public events, and present to school administrators every season.
We also ask the school to make announcements when we have a tournament or when our team is especially relevant, and we also dress nice the friday before each competition (just like our sports teams) to draw attention to ourselves and raise awareness about our team.
We have also found that people are suddenly interested in our team when they hear the words “World Championship.” Using the news of our qualification for Worlds to captivate people and get them interested allows us to explain to them more about our team and VEX.
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Yeah, we’ve done all of this too, except the facebook page and dressing nice. Our principle turned us down when we asked if we could make a facebook page and/or a website 
. We simply don’t like to wear dress clothes lol, but we do tend to wear the team shirt. What I’ve noticed though, at least with our student body, the mention of the world championship ends up attracting the wrong kind of to our team. We usually get someone who says “That’s cool, but I’m not smart enough.” or “I want to go to California!”. We honestly do try to explain to the people who say they aren’t smart enough that they are, since even showing interest in the program is about all you need, but they don’t believe us.
Do you really need permission from the principal to make a team facebook page? We just kind of started it up out of the blue for extra publicity, none of our administrators have questioned its existence (they have also enjoyed seeing our website and the updates we put on that).
Our case may be different though, as our principal really likes our team. Our school is small and not always incredibly strong against the larger schools that surround us, so the success of our team draws positive attention from the community and from other schools.
People say the same things to us, but our club has several factors that limit its size at the moment, so we’re not hugely concerned about growing it. Our growth plan right now is to draw new VEX kids from our heavily expanding FLL program, and possibly start a VEX IQ team as a sort of advanced group of the older FLL kids as that competition looks like a good transition to bridge the gap between FLL and VEX.
I think the best way to let friends know that they are smart enough is to explain VEX in detail and compare it to other things that they may have done before (for my friend I compared chain wraps and our chain/sprocket systems to an old chainsaw and an old bike that he had worked on). Once they start to understand more details of the activity they will realize that it’s not so mind-bogglingly complex after all.
Our school typically uses our robotics program as a way to attract new students for the school. Our program is definitely one of he highlights of our school community, and all of us in the program feel that way as well. We don’t really have many issues with attracting “the wrong kind of people” to the club for reasons like just being able to go to California. Our club has grown quite steadily over the last 10 years, starting with a handful of students that made up a team or two and growing to over 40 kids, where next year, we are looking at having 9 or 10 teams of five or so.
As far as the team website goes, I’m sorry to see that your school denied you the chance of having a website for publicity. I would figure that making a robotics and engineering program at your school would be something to talk about and get out there for prospective students.
You can’t make a club website? That sounds a little off to me…
I really can’t figure out why. The only thing the principle would let us have was a little text window on the school edline page. Our current principle is leaving this year though, so maybe next year!
So what would happen if somebody set up a page or blog that you just happened to post to ;);)
?
We just happen to have an unlimited hosting account that has numerous Wordpress and Joomla sites on it already…
Hmmm… I may just have to take you up on that! I’ll talk to the rest of my team about it on monday. This would really be awesome!
Just go to domain.com and register the domain name you want (cost about $10.00). I will then give you the information for you to update the nameserver. Then I will install Wordpress or Joomla and give you the logon info so you can get to work setting it up the way you want it.
Ok, I talked to my team about it, we all agreed that this would be awesome! I guess we should proceed in PM’s? Just to make sure though, are you possitive you are willing to do this for us?
It’s not problem, I pay a decent sum of money for an unlimited hosting account, and just renewed it for another year on 5/31. The only limits on my account are processes and inode usage which a simple website would have very little effect on.
You can either PM me or email me at [email protected] and I will send you the nameserver information.
Wow, thanks a lot! I will let you know when we have a domain and I guess we can get started then!
we use the following …
Local newspaper (articles all year around)
Local radio (live interview)
National Radio (UK) (played the live interview from above)
Twitter
Facebook
Leaflets / School newsletters
Websites etc …
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if you wanted to learn and write a website from scratch in HTML, pm me and i can send you information for a website host, they give you 10gb storage, FTP access, and my site has never been down (no-complaints from people anyway), i am currently building a brand new website
obviously HTML is a little more advanced then using something like wordpress but is easy to learn if you look in the correct places