Mentors are what make FIRST special.

Unlike most youth programs, FIRST encourages mentors to be engaged and hands-on with the work alongside the students.  The more mentors we have, the more students we can engage and inspire.  We'd love to have you work with us!

What is the time commitment?

Generally, we would expect a mentor to attend one meeting each week during the school year.  During the fall, there's normally only one meeting each week.  From January through March, the team enters its build and competition season with the shop open about two nights a week and weekend afternoons.  We'd love to have you whenever we can, but we can make plans around a part-time schedule.

We generally travel three times per year, which create special opportunities for one-off volunteer roles like wrangling food for the team (which generally doesn't have time to leave the venue) or driving a U-Haul with our equipment to the venue.  We try to attend two regional competitions, which are normally Wednesday-Saturday trips.  We also attend an off-season tournament, which generally leaves Friday afternoon at the earliest.

But I don't know how to build a robot...

Hah! We're led by a machinist and someone with a marketing degree.  Don't worry, we'll get you comfortable in our world.

Some specific areas of need include:

• We just added a CNC router to our shop!  If you've got experience in operating one, you can make an instant impact.

• We've had a lathe for a few years, but lost our mentor with the skills to do a lot with it.  Getting this running would let us make our robots better in a lot of small ways.

• Programming the robot has a bit of a learning curve to start.  We program in Java, and there are some big libraries provided by FIRST and parts suppliers we can tap into for the bulk of the work.  But a mentor focused on this work can really take it to the next level.

• If you've got a woodworking background, that's great!  We mock up the key parts of each year's field out of wood, so we can test the robot and practice driving.

• A background in computer-aided design will help a lot.  We work in Onshape, a browser-based CAD package that works on just about any device (including the students' Chromebooks) and that has a massive library of common parts already modeled to save us time.  It's a pretty easy switchover if you've used any other package.

• And yes, we can use some good old-fashioned wrenching experience too!

But I don't want to build a robot...

Honestly, that's a plus!  The program has many aspects that we'd love to expand on, but haven't historically for bandwidth reasons:

• Keeping this website and our social media looking sharp

• Helping our teachers with travel logistics

• Photography and videography

• Submitting for judged awards

• Organizing demonstrations using our old robots

• Writing grants

• Organizing food for build meetings

• Developing training and documentation

• Backing up our student safety captain by developing process improvements

So how do I get started?

Contact Billfred Leverette at billfred@pandamaniacs.org and we'll meet up for a tour and a chat before we start onboarding steps like the background check.