The school year commences, we introduce students to FRC and everything that we will do throughout the year. We train students on programming, tool training, and more.
We continue training students and they then get to choose what they may want to be doing during the remaining of the off-season, in order to prepare for kickoff. We introduce the upcoming competition, the annual one being CalGames, troubleshooting the robot as needed.
As we finish up prepping and include drive practice for the team and new members, CalGames begins as an off-season event. Additional off-season event such as Capitol City Classic [CCC] and more. This gives the rookies a peek into competition for kickoff.
As most off-season events conclude, the team has major discussions on what we shall do for the rest of the year until kickoff. As we begin grouping into certain departments, the team gets a view of who is on what for the season.
Because the school year has a break in the end of this month, we have short training weeks followed by some spirit celebrations. These include the Pirate Dinner among the team, a potluck and celebration just to have a good time!
A new year means a new game. The team awaits kickoff and begins strategizing from designs of the robot to full-field movements to score best. This is the beginning of what follows 6 weeks of work.
The team continues working on the robot, designing, building, coding, and more. This is the time we begin to exceed shop days, making Tuesdays and Saturdays exclusively for working on the robot and getting progress done.
Competitions begin, and depending on whether we have the robot ready or not, the team decides what we do for the few weeks we have before competition. These include finalizing the physical robot, finishing up code, or even starting some drive practice with our new robot if we can!
We have usually already gone to at least 1 competition around this time, if not already our 2nd. We finish up the competition season with any last changes and begin to continue making any modifications to our robot.
As of May, the team should have done some changes to the robot, a bit of outreach, and beginning the grant season for branding. The rest of the group continues to learn about ways they can improve for off-season and next year.
June being the end of the school year drifts the team off as some leave and some stay. Depending on the team's plans for the summer, we meet and work on our summer goals/plans.
As we prepare for the upcoming school year, we finish up and continue some goals that will stretch out to next year's season. Preparing our plans for teaching the new rookies for the year.