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.
Fritzing diagrams are great for showing how electronic circuits are wired without needing to understand schematics.
youtube has video tutorials on virtually any topic