New Team Making Advice

VEX V5 General Discussion
1

Hi Ya’ll.

This past year I have been doing my own research here and there about this past season and have learned a ton.

I really want to start a V5 team at my school next year (and I already got permission!)

I just need a little more guidance about how the team should be. How many people should be on the team? What jobs do I need people for? If there is high demand how do I decide who should be on the team and who shouldn’t?

And then for the specifics, for people who are willing to learn but have little experience, how do they learn how to build and engineer the robots? How do they learn what every single piece is called, how to use it and how to build it? One might say that if they can’t do any of those things they shouldn’t be on the team, but I can think of one person currently who could be very promising for the team but how little experience with VEX. What resources are there that can get people more familiar with drive train designs and mech designs?

Thanks

2

I always say this. The search button exists! It is amazing. But you should find this useful New Team Starting Resources

3

Pick the most dedicated people you can. They can learn everything else. For learning, I suggest starting early season and trail and error, and maybe asking local teams for advice. You do not want to be in the situation I was temporarily in when I had to do everything. Pick 3-4 people you know can dedicate 10+ hours a week, have everyone pick what they want to try, and adjust roles as needed

4
  1. Depends on the team, if you’re gonna be private 5-8 is optimal, just cause of cost cutting, but if you think you’ll have sufficient funds at the very most have 4-6 members.
  2. Only choose people who you think will be dedicated.
  3. Learn to do research, look at previous teams robot explanations such as 229V from high stakes (Tons of great build qual tips in there) or look at pits and parts robots.
  4. The way most somewhat decent teams learn to build robots is by using CAD (Such as Onshape, fusion, solidworks, etc), building the design and tuning it along with documenting this process in your engneering notebook.
  5. Learning every piece comes with experience, but learning how to use it and build it is pretty intuitive as long as you know what you want on your bot, which is where CAD helps.
  6. I wouldn’t say this, if you’re struggling to find people try to find people with good character, character is way more important than skill, purley because skill can be trained while character can’t, along with making sure they’ll be dedicated to the team.
  7. ALL the resources you will need are somewhere online such as discord, the VEX Fourm, youtube, coding documentation, and so on. Just search it up and you’ll almost 100% find it.
5

In V5, I think the sweet spot is 3-5 students per team. Less than that and it becomes a little too much of a commitment for whoever is there, and more than that and people just won’t have anything to do. As far as learning how to do things, theres not a ton you can do other than try things out, see what works, and importantly, pay attention to what other teams are doing. One thing to note is you can learn from the best teams around you how to build better robots by studying theirs, and you can learn from teams that aren’t as good what not to do. If people need to learn names for parts, just use those names during meetings. But above all else, remember that this is an educational competition, and its okay to not be very good as long as, in the process, you learn and become a better engineer.

6

Yes, I agree with this statement lol.

You should keep in mind that if you want to perform well, you usually have to dedicate a LOT of your time to VEX. You should tell whoever you meet that they have to be able to be committed to robotics and be able to meet a lot over an expanse of time.

Like @kkaidenn there are a lot of new team resources out there, the link they shared answers quite a few of your questions and is a good guiding resource that you should keep in mind. For choosing who to put on your team, you primarily want to pick people that (like I said earlier) you know can commit to it. It can also be nice for beginners if the people on their team are friends or someone they know, but that is not required.
To learn all of the building specifics, the best way would be to get a coach of some sort that can teach you basics and guide you. If that isn’t possible, then there are a lot of resources about building out there. I specifically reccomend looking on YouTube, as it has a LOT of tutorials on how to build stuff in V5 that you can reference and learn. But places like the VEX Forum, the PurdueSigbots Wiki, and others are all really good.
For getting people familiar with designs, once again the VEX Forum (there are lots of resources on things like drive gearings, build techniques, and all), and YouTube (check out people like LukeDoesRobotics, 9MotorGang, and FunRobotics) are both really good.