Student Robotics (e.g. FIRST)

[Matt Snyder]

Hi all, I signed up as a community member, and dropped in for your business meeting tonight.  I learned about your group first at the robotics expo at Mineral Area College.  I have heard that you have some plans to assist FIRST robotics teams in some way, and I'm very interested to hear more about your plans.  My organization has a goal to connect robotics teams, especially smaller FTC and FRC teams, with local fabrication facilities.  There's a similar organization over in Edwardsville that brings teams into the community college fab lab, and we hope to do something like that for teams on this side of the river.

We're also interested in other student robotics competitions, and there's one obscure one called Word Robotics Olympiad that I think would be fun to bring to the Science Center.

Thanks,

Matt

[jimski...@gmail.com]

What's the organization in Edwardsville? That's pretty close to me... I don't know about the groups FIRST plans but someone should jump in to answer that knows.

[matt.search...@gmail.com]

The Edwardsville organization is Edwardsville Robotics: http://www.edwardsvillerobotics.org/ . I'm not sure where their normal meeting place is, but I know they use the Fab Lab at Lewis and Clark CC.

[annbo...@gmail.com]

What's your organization Matt?

Ann Boes
director of the Expo at MAC

[Matt Snyder]

Mine is St. Louis Student Robotics Association: http://www.slsra.org/ 

[Ann Boes]

I see you want to support teams and help create additional competition opportunities. Will you be a membership organization?  How do teams become affiliated and what are the benefits to them in the partnership?

Ann

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[Matt Snyder]

Great questions, Ann.  It's technically a non-member organization, and team affiliation will be somewhat informal: a signup by an adult mentor or coach.  One of the reasons we formed the association is that robotics teams are not really entities, just a group of students registered for some competitions, so they can't do a lot of the things that would really help them.  They can't easily receive donations, for example.  Most teams rely on a school to be their parent entity, but there are independent teams, teams with students from multiple schools, etc.  We are working with one team now that is in limbo because they were a Girl Scout team meeting at a high school, until the high school encountered Title IX issues over the team being all girls, so now the team belongs to neither the Girl Scouts nor the high school.  So for these teams that need a parent, we will fill that role.

The main benefit will then be a parent legal entity to help with finances and securing meeting places.  The second benefit will be networking, to connect teams with opportunities for outreach and fund raising.  Outreach and fund raising are supposed to be big parts of the robotics experience, but teams are often unskilled at finding ways to do them.  So, for example, we will hopefully have a booth at Murmuration, and some of our teams will staff the booth, but they don't know it yet, because they're all on summer vacation and not thinking about outreach opportunities 3 months in advance.

A third benefit, we hope, will be help finding fabrication resources.  I'm talking primarily about FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) teams, because FTC has evolved to the point that teams need custom fabrication to be competitive, yet many teams are working in school libraries, and would otherwise need luck to have access to a fab lab: a knowledgeable parent willing to take the kids on a field trip, for example.  

Organizing competitions is actually how the idea started.  Last season, the Missouri FTC committee announced that their system of big qualifier tournaments had reached its scalability limit, while the number of teams increases every year.  In this coming season, in addition to the big qualifiers, there will be a series of small "meets" hosted by independent groups.  My partner and I have always thought we could put on a better tournament, so we got in line to organize some meets.  The plan is for our affiliated teams to pitch in on meet days, and that pitching in helps the teams by giving them something to brag about to judges.

[annbo...@gmail.com]

Sounds like it could be a good resource for teams. I'll pass along the info to some folks. How should they get ahold of you?

[Matt Snyder]

Thanks Ann!  The best ways are email matt...@slsra.org , phone 636-336-BOTS , and twitter @stlstubots