Southampton January Tech Day Report

[Andrew Barrett-Sprot]

Hi,

We just had the most successful tech day I've seen in the last 3 years!

5 teams turned up, including BRK, BPV, Carshalton, and 2 others which I can't remember off the top of my head right now.

We decided to give the students a quick Python tutorial near the end of the day, which seemed to go down well. I'd recommend it for other tech days.

Other things useful to teams are:

- Some access to carpet similar to that of the competition, to get an idea on how well it turns.

- Proper SR tokens (including the plastic faces, teams like to test them for vacuum pumps)

- Being able to take tokens home with them for their own testing.

We wrote down a list of things we could have improved at https://slack-files.com/T0EEPF1LH-F3X2Z0BLY-ac397b4ef9 the ones which would transfer over to other kickstarts are:

- Starting at 9:00am on a Saturday is too early for most teams, I suggest 10:00am at the earliest.

- Make sure teams have access to computers or spare laptops, despite no teams asking for laptops in advance, we had to lend 2 out anyway.

- Maybe bringing extra tools for students? not sure about health and safety issues here.

If you have any questions about how to run a successful tech-day, just ask!

Thanks,

Andy B-S

[Peter Law]

Hi Andy,

> We just had the most successful tech day I've seen in the last 3 years!

That's great news, well done! Do you know why you were so much more
successful this time than in the past? (I'm particularly curious as
this was something we came up with some ideas for previously [2], but
I don't know which (if any) have been widely adopted)

> *notes on successes and things to improve*

Awesome! Great to see that you're relentlessly iterating the knowledge
around running Tech Days and sharing the results for others to benefit
from. Thanks for doing this!

Thanks,
Peter

[1] "Tech Day Attendance":
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/srobo/fmJhC2H0hOM/discussion

On 28 January 2017 at 23:18, Andrew Barrett-Sprot

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[Andrew Barrett-Sprot]

Hi Peter,

I think the main contributing factor to the attendance is giving teams advanced reminder emails, this time the email was sent 17 days before the actual tech day, thus giving teams enough time to prepare.

Usually we only send them a week beforehand. Maybe this is just too short notice.

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[Peter Law]

Hi Andy & Teams Coordinator,

> I think the main contributing factor to the attendance is giving teams
> advanced reminder emails, this time the email was sent 17 days before the
> actual tech day, thus giving teams enough time to prepare.
>
> Usually we only send them a week beforehand. Maybe this is just too short
> notice.

This is interesting and fits with the patterns I've observed before.
We definitely found that a mailshot to all the team-leaders with
plenty of notice has improved attendance dramatically in the past.

The data I've seen in the past is on the old Tech Days/Attendance page
on trac [1] (which now unfortunately needs a login to access for some
reason). The original Tech Days page [2] contains guidance for running
a Tech Day, which includes the suggestion to inform the teachers as
soon as possible.

It's a shame we've had to go through several years of failed Tech Days
in order to re-learn something we already knew.

@Teams Coordinator: Is there a canonical checklist for organising a
Tech Day which we could ensure that this knowledge (along with all the
other previous learnings) are collected into? (The existing
documentation I've found for Tech Days [3] is rather barren!) It would
be a real shame if this re-learnt information was once again lost for
several years.

Thanks,
Peter

[1] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/Tech%20Days/Attendance
[2] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/Tech%20Days
[3] https://github.com/fgillan/sr-team-coord/wiki/Tech-Days