First time FIRST volunteer, any suggestions

[Mark Yedinak]

Well I decided to take the plunge and volunteer for the FIRST competition here in Chicago. The local organizer is pretty happy to have me volunteer since she generally has problems finding people in the actual city to help out and I live in the city. Anyway I was wondering if anyone who has done this before has any good advice or suggestions for a newbie volunteer.

Thanks

[jcarmody]

[...] I was wondering if anyone who has done this before has any good advice or suggestions for a newbie volunteer.

I haven't done it before (so feel free to disregard the post coming from someone that ignores plainly written requests) but a friend of mine did. The advice I'd try to follow if/when I volunteer would be to get everything at home & work done before it starts because you're going to be <colossal understatement> busy </colossal understatement>. The spouses created a "widows" club... It's a fantastic concept that your team will strategize/design/fabricate/build/test/debug/practice a robot in only six weeks.

Good luck and keep us posted.

[Mark Balla]

Well I decided to take the plunge and volunteer for the FIRST competition here in Chicago. The local organizer is pretty happy to have me volunteer since she generally has problems finding people in the actual city to help out and I live in the city. Anyway I was wondering if anyone who has done this before has any good advice or suggestions for a newbie volunteer.

Thanks

Did you volunteer to Mentor a team or are you going to work during the competition.

Thanks for reminding me to get signed up for the comming year.

I am very interested in getting involved this year and my team from last year has disbanded.

[ned]

I haven't done it before (so feel free to disregard the post coming from someone that ignores plainly written requests) but a friend of mine did. The advice I'd try to follow if/when I volunteer would be to get everything at home & work done before it starts because you're going to be <colossal understatement> busy </colossal understatement>. The spouses created a "widows" club... It's a fantastic concept that your team will strategize/design/fabricate/build/test/debug/practice a robot in only six weeks.

Are you volunteering just for the competition, or to help mentor a team? If you're just helping at an event, it's a lot less work than jcarmody suggests. I mentored a team at my former high school last year and was there 2 nights/week from the kickoff in January through the regional competition in February; the team also had another LabVIEW mentor. I also attended one day of the regional competition with the team and found out too late that the overall event would have benefited from an on-site LabVIEW expert to help during the practice day when the teams are trying to make sure everything works.

Last year was the first year LabVIEW was an option for programming the robots and I didn't see any teams using complex code, maybe they'll be more advanced this year. Teams don't need to write that much code because the framework that NI provides is nearly enough to run the robots. I think it's more helpful to have experience working with high school students (and I can't provide much advice there) than it is to have knowledge of advanced LabVIEW concepts. It will help to understand the provided framework, but unfortunately I don't know of any way to get access to it without the FIRST-provided CD, and you can't install the FIRST version of LabVIEW and the standard version side-by-side. Last year's framework used global variables and VI server to abort a running subVI in a way that simplified the code for the students but was puzzling to an experienced LabVIEW programmer. If you can't get access to an installation of the FIRST software, reading the documents or viewing Ben Zimmer's FIRST TipJar videos is a good start.

[joshxdr]

Well I decided to take the plunge and volunteer for the FIRST competition here in Chicago. The local organizer is pretty happy to have me volunteer since she generally has problems finding people in the actual city to help out and I live in the city. Anyway I was wondering if anyone who has done this before has any good advice or suggestions for a newbie volunteer.

Thanks

Hi Mark, I was a part-time FRC mentor last year (I could only volunteer once a week). I assume you are volunteering for FRC (FIRST Robotics Challenge) which is the biggest competition under the FIRST umbrella. FIRST provides a software framework, in both C++ and LabVIEW, that provides a ton of abstraction for operating the robot. It is relatively easy to make the robot run and do things. Some of the challenges of being a FIRST mentor have nothing to do with teaching the students how to program or design a robot. There is a lot of fundraising, logistics, buying tools, herding students, setting up the workshop, setting up a new workshop after you get kicked out of the old one, etc. Being successful in the competition has a lot to do with things like scouting, researching the competition on the internet, human driver skill, and knowing the right strategy for the game itself. It is not purely an engineering competition, although the goal is to expose the students to the engineering field in a fun way.

It is a cliche but mentoring is another case of what you get out of it is what you put into it. I wish I had more time to volunteer, because it really is a fun competition and both the mentors and the students get a lot out of it. I would recommend volunteering at least twice a week, and get involved early (like right now) so that you can be part of the training and preparation of the team before the competition season. I have heard there are a wide range of team philosophies, from very professional and disciplined teams to teams that do 90% of the work over the last week of build season and at the competition. I did not go to the actual competition but I heard it was a fun, exhausting, crazy marathon.

Good luck with your FRC mentor experience!

Edited October 25, 2009 by joshxdr

[Mark Yedinak]

Did you volunteer to Mentor a team or are you going to work during the competition.

Thanks for reminding me to get signed up for the comming year.

I am very interested in getting involved this year and my team from last year has disbanded.

Mark,

At this time I will be working on the one day challenge. I will be attending both the practice day and the actual event itself. At this point it is unclear whethe rI will be working with a single team or if I will be working as a floating mentor. I had indicated that I would like to mentor a team for the FRC but I am still waiting to hear if there are specific teams in my general area that I can work with. There are some teams way down on the simply be impractical for me to be able to mentor them from a travel and time perspective.

There was one high school that was on the fence whether they would participate or not again. I guess they had trouble getting people to help them. I would be ideal for this team since the school is about a mile from my house.