We have a new robotics program for our district. There will be about 10 VRC teams ranging from 6th grade into high school. We plan on doing a kick-off event with all the students and coaches before they start building. What would you cover at this meeting?
I always think a video of a real robot goes a long way so when I was introducing the new game to some teachers a few weeks back I included this video. It is something simple that a couple guys put together in 3 days for the new game.
Here is what I used last year for our first night’s slides… I guess it’s time to make this year’s version.
After the intro comes in the basics of building your robot, using tools, safety, common sense, goal oriented design process, etc. You have ten new teams at once. That will be quite a steep curve across a large base of teams.
What is your mentor setup like? Having mentors per team helps a ton in the project management and reigning in expectations. Limiting up to 5 students per robot ensures you get more hands on and not a lot of standing around being idle and most likely will drop. Keep them busy and the interest will be sustained.
This is an excellent introduction to VEX. And I don’t say that about much of anything. Explaining what we do has always felt more complicated than it should be, but you’ve done it so… concisely. I wish we had put something like this together years ago, when I was still on a high school team.
If anyone is looking for a template of what to hit, look no further. This is it.
Thanks. I forgot to mention we also play the season intro video to show the game and drive around some of the previous season’s robots to show how they move and what happens when you drive them, beginner and advanced controls (doing tasks at the push of a button versus doing it on a stick yourself), etc.
I like your parent night slide presentation. That looks like what we want to cover in two different nights. The first nights is an information meeting. The next presentation, a week later, is the first night of the students meeting.
We will have at least a mentor or two per team. Of course this year those of us with some experience will be mentoring the mentors.
We would like to keep team size between 4 to 6 students.
using tools, safety… two good suggestions to add to the list.
