2018 FIRST Robotics Competition

[John Failor]

Hi Raptors, 

I hope you enjoying the holidays with your family.  The 2018 FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) season is fast approaching.  Tony McGinty and I wanted to share some important information about the upcoming season.  

1.  On Saturday, January 6, we enter into our competitive season that is an accumulation of robot construction, team marketing, district tournaments and hopefully State and possibly World competition participation. Over the next 8 weeks, the team will be intensively engaged in their work. The technical team have 6 weeks to build the machine of those 8 weeks, plenty to do for the remaining 2 weeks. We move from an official 2 evenings a week to an additional 2 evenings and a Saturday work session. You may find your student is quite willing to spend Tuesday through Saturday at the school contributing to their objectives. We have a simple rule, homework FIRST, then FIRST robotics! Please make sure your students are keeping on top of their school work as grades will be checked before we allow any student to participate in the competitive activities. The official end date of the robot build is Tuesday, February 20.  Practices will intensify that last weekend and two days to the Tuesday midnight.

2.  The Kick-Off event on Saturday the 6^th will start at 10:00am and continue till 5pm which will be the watching of the live world-wide broadcast of the 2018 game objective followed by a Pizza lunch then strategizing till pick-up at 5pm.

3.  The dates of our competitions are March 1^st- 3^rd @Traverse City (Central Gym), March 15^th-17th @Gaylord High-School, April 11^th-14^th @SVSU, Saginaw (State) and April 25^th-28^th @Cobo Hall, Detroit (Worlds). Parents are welcome to join us anytime and often do.  We will need help with chaperoning and tranporting students.  

4.  Our season meeting times are Tuesday – Friday, 6:30pm – 8:30pm and Saturday 10:00am till 5pm. As a note, students should not be in the school without a member of faculty or approved adult present. For safety, we do make sure an adult stays with any students after robotics till all students have left the premises.

5.  Our robotics program is self funded through State, industry, community and personal sponsorship/donations. There is a per-student cost of $125 that we would like to collect at the Saturday January 6^th Kick off event that will take place at the school. If there is difficulty with this cost, please let Mr. Failor know at fail...@tcaps.net and he can discuss alternatives with you. Checks can be made out to TCAPS.  We are also looking for sponosors for the team.  Contact John Failor for more information about team sponsorships.  The following is the typical cost model for the program:

Program and Regional Tournaments

FIRST Team Registration:                              $5000
Team Travel & Living:                                     $3500
Materials, Spares and Tooling                        $3500  
Team T’s, Buttons, Spirit Items                       $2000
                                                                     ======
                                                                     $15,000

State Tournament                                 $5000-$7,000
World Tournament                                     $10,000
 

6.  All students are required to register to our FIRST Robotics program where at this time, most have done so. But, there is a parental component to this. Can we request that all parents log into the website http://firstinspires.org and sign-up or login with your student and they can help you complete parental CONSENT form. Again, we need that done prior to any student involvement with the team. At this time, only 40% of parents have completed these forms.  Here is more info from FIRST about this process:                       1.  Please visit www.firstinspires.org and log into your parent account. 

         2.  When you are on your Dashboard, please click the "Parent/Guardian-Youth" tab, and you should see your child's name.  

         3.  Please click the blue "Youth Options" box and select Youth's Consent & Release."

         4.  The second consent form is found under FIRST's form.  Please click anywhere on the title to expand it and click the blue Accept box.  

7.  We also have a student contract that governs their participation and conduct while attending meetings and competitions. We also ask all parents and students to sign this document that is especially important for student management when we are away at competitions that will be Gaylord and hopefully Saginaw and Detroit this year. We will distribute those prior to or at the kick off event.

8.  We also need some help. As the team meets on Saturdays, we have a lot of hungry students on our hands. We need a lunch co-ordinator parent who can organize with other parents to help with providing Saturday lunch. This will be a person who can create a parent schedule and remind scheduled parents to bring in foods for their specific Saturdays. We typically do this with a Google group or could be done on Slack (our team communicator) as well. If a parent is willing to handle this important role (Freshman-Junior parent preferred), that would be a great help to us all. Lunches are typically pastas, sloppy Joe’s, salads, veggies, cheeses, fruit, surprises, cookies and any simple desserts as well  as water and juice packages that we can put into the large juice dispensers.

9.  The primary tool for team communication is Slack.  We will use this google group email periodically.  Your student can help you join Slack.  

 
Finally, we invite all parents to stop in and say hello over the coming weeks, see what your student is doing, how they are contributing and how the team are progressing towards their goal. It is always a delight to ‘meet the parents’ of our wonderful students.

Please contact us with any questions.  

Thanks,

John Failor                                           Tony McGinty
fail...@tcaps.net                               tony.m...@genesys.com