“Off season” plans
With the team’s end-of-year dinner last Friday, we are officially in the off-season. With me being a volunteer for FRC and FTC as well, off-season is surely a nice break, right? Well, sort of.
For 2910, I’m working on our programming curriculum for our new programming students. That needs to be done by September, so it’s a solid amount of work to get together. Any portion I work on will also be posted in the programming course on here, so hopefully that can serve as a resource for the community. In the fall, we bring in our new potential students and have applications, which always sucks, but we don’t have physical space for more. As one of the intro to programming mentors, there’s not a ton of difference before and after kickoff for me on the team side.
As for my FTC involvement, that is definitely the busiest part of my life in the fall. This month, I’ll be attending the Run for the Robots premier event in Kentucky. It’ll be the first event I think I’ve ever attended as a spectator. I’m looking forward to bringing my niece to her first robotics competition ever. She’s never even seen a robot before. Shortly before the FTC kickoff, my role as one of the two senior head referees for the FTC in Washington will start up. Last year, we scheduled almost all of the referee assignments for the state, so even before kickoff rolls around, we will be sending our referees an interest form so we have a vague idea of the numbers we have versus the numbers we need. After kickoff, Josh and I will wind up going through the manual countless times, writing up clarifications and standards we want to be used throughout the state. We always hope that the manual has clear rules, but there is always something like launching last year that had basically no guidance on what “launching” is and what it is not. As we do not want teams to have things such as this called differently at the events in Washington, we define a state-wide standard. That process starts immediately following manual release, and then we iterate every week as we learn from the Q&A and from our referees what is and isn’t clear. We’ll set training dates and times. Once our FTC competition season starts (usually late October), Josh and I spend hours and hours every week trying to keep students able to rely on the same refereeing calls and standards throughout the state. We also try to constantly improve the experience of our referees. When you add in that most years I’m at FTC events all weekend, every weekend, it’s clear that FTC pretty much owns my fall.
FRC (thankfully) is pretty chill as a volunteer until January. I will be the head referee at Clash in the Corn in Iowa in October. I’ll also be (likely) volunteering at Block Party, Girls Gen, and Bordie here in Washington, but I have no idea yet in what role.
Next time you see a mentor or volunteer who seems like they are always around, remember that they are likely giving up their “off-season” to give their students the best experience they possibly can.
My Newton division winner and championship winner medals with my 2910 programming mentor bow.
