Soton TD1

[Alistair Lynn]

Hi all–

Just a quick note. You'll be pleased to hear that we've smashed all
previous records on attendance this tech day, and we also have the
highest Blueshirt to competitor ratio of any tech day so far to boot.

Alistair

[Murray Colpman]

To further clarify this point, the record-breaking attendance level was
zero (well, one teacher from CLY come to pick up kit dropped off by
Steve English), and so the Blueshirt to competitor ratio was possibly
infinite.

This is especially odd, since aside from the teacher from CLY, two
usually-reliable teams confirmed they were turning up - one of which
quoted the date - with no indication that they wouldn't be.

One suggestion that has been put forward is that because the email
actually went out on time this year, schools might have forgotten about
it and needed a reminder. Scarzy's father, for instance, did not
remember receiving an email when Scarzy mentioned it to him.

So yeah, the day basically became a doing - we sat around in the room
doing development until around 5pm to ensure nobody turned up really
late or something.

Any other thoughts? Tech day attendance has been weirdly low for the
past couple of years, compared to in the past - perhaps the lack of
emphasis of tech days at kickstart (compared to old kickstart) is
somewhat to blame? Or maybe it's just that most rookie teams are away
from Southampton now and most teams around Southampton feel confident
enough not to have to turn up?

Murray.

[Peter Law]

Murray wrote:
> Any other thoughts? Tech day attendance has been weirdly low for the
> past couple of years, compared to in the past

Something I'd put forwards is that (IMO) the team members themselves
are more likely to remember about a Tech Day if a mentor tells them
about and gets them enthused about it during a mentoring/build
session. Given that there has been no mentoring around Southampton as
yet, this certainly seems to fit.

Separately, do we have any actual data on the number of people/teams
turning up to tech days? If not, I think we should start recording
this. I've create a trac page "Tech Days/Attendance" [1] for this and
filled in the data I could.

Peter

[1] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/Tech%20Days/Attendance