Developing training

Overview

Much of the Fall (September-December) is spent on training: building the skills we will use during build season. Training is divided into Overview Training (for all students/mentors) and Advanced Training (more specialized training for students on a sub-team such as control systems or mechanical or operations).

The purpose of overview training is to help everyone understand what 2537 does as a team and how it does it. After overview training, students should understand what a robot is, how it is built, how the team operates to build it, and the basic skills used. Overview Training should:

• Be on the team wiki (if you don't have access, please let me know asap) - NOT on the Google Drive

• Provide the big picture (e.g. how the robot works or how funds are raised)

• Help new students and mentors understand in detail what each subteam does

• Be fun and light-hearted (dad-jokes are allowed)

• Be hands-on as much as possible (include exercises)

• Be self-paced (many students don't attend every meeting)

• Use/link to as much existing online material as possible (don't re-invent the wheel)

Overview training should not:

• Cause death by power-point

• Teach detailed skills (soldering, crimping, Java, milling)

• Focus excessively on theory (math/physics/etc.) or requires skills/knowledge a freshman might not have

• Take more than 2-3 meetings per discipline (electrical, software, mech, ops, etc.)

Please don't re-invent the wheel! For almost any topic, there are already existing excellent training materials that you can link to (see Training Resources below). A template for developing training materials is here. Some past examples of self-paced online lessons are here

An outline/template for new student/mentor training is ​here

You can get fancy with wiki pages if you know html; you can embed most html tags in wiki pages, see ​here for info.

Tools

• ​Fritzing diagrams are great for showing how electronic circuits are wired without needing to understand schematics.

• ​youtube has video tutorials on virtually any topic

Training Resources

• ​http://learn.adafruit.com

• ​http://learn.sparkfun.com

• ​http://instructables.com

• ​https://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/4485

• ​https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=FRC+Tutorials