
Over the years, we have seen and talked to many new teams. Thinking back on our own start, we then realized that a lot of teams starting out need good advice on how to begin their season. Starting an FTC team can be a difficult task, and getting it off the ground and running is even harder without guidance. We decided to create a large list of advice for fledgling teams to help them become great teams.
Here is the list:
-
Starting a New Team
-
Find other people to join your team
-
This can be through a school, neighborhood, or just friends
-
-
Decide on a coach, assistant coach, and mentors
-
These are usually the parents of the team members
-
-
Try to gain sponsors to fund your team; the robot and outreach can get pretty expensive
-
-
Outreach
-
Start as soon as possible
-
For many teams this is the beginning of the offseason (or summer)
-
-
Reach out to small businesses through emails
-
Follow up with an in person meeting where you can do a demo
-
-
Do events at locations to spread FIRST, robotics, and STEM
-
Try to put your own unique spin on these events
-
They can be at expos, libraries, schools,
-
-
Create social media accounts to spread awareness of your team
-
Make a trifold for people to look at during events
-
Be prepared for every outreach event
-
Try to create a schedule for how the event is going to go
-
-
Be flexible; not everything will go as planned
-
-
Robot Design
-
Start by determining what the robot needs to do
-
This usually includes movement, scanning, and grabbing of some sort
-
-
Create sketches of potential ideas
-
Discuss the ideas with your team and narrow the list down to only a few
-
List the pros and cons of each; make sure no idea is rejected immediately
-
-
Build prototypes of the decided ideas and test them out
-
Pick the design that was most successful and make it better
-
-
Competition
-
Create a scouting document to make a profile of each team’s abilities in the robot game
-
This helps for gaining information on alliance partners, opponents, and potential alliance partners in the elimination rounds
-
-
Schedule practice ahead of time
-
These tend to fill up very quickly, and it is good to practice before actual rounds to test out both TeleOp and Autonomous
-
-
Determine players ahead of time
-
The two controllers and coach should be decided early in the season so that they have time to practice and improve in TeleOp
-
-
-
Miscellaneous
-
Do team building activities to build chemistry
-
This can be something simple like laser tag
-
-
Allow team members to take a small snack break when they want during the meetings
-
However, make sure not everyone takes it at the same time; this will hurt productivity
-
-
Create appealing team shirts
-
Have some sort of prop that represents your team
-
Ex. a pin with a picture of a circuit on it for representing the Circuit Breakers
-
-



