FRC Quick Facts
Starting an FRC can seem overwhelming at initial glance. Not to worry, FIRSTWA will help you as much as possible.
Pre-requisites
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Team size: 8 to 30 high school students
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Mentors: Consider having a student / mentor ratio of 6 / 1
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School support: If you are at a high school, talk to the principal to insure you have support
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Talk to the experts: Check with your FRC State Chairman or other local organizer. You have lots of questions, they have lots of answers.
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Funding: A typical FRC rookie team needs about $10,000 to participate. Grants are available, and some state funding is available. If you want to do this, we can help find you funding.
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Location: You will need access to a facility (shop, garage, classroom) to build your robot. You will need access to this room in the afternoons/evenings/weekends for about 6 weeks during Jan and Feb
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Mentor Team: It is very useful to have an experienced FRC team help you out. It is part of our FIRST culture to help each other. We all benefit from it. We all are rewarded for it.
Addtional Steps
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Create an account here at firstwa.org. Click the register tab above. You will gain additional access to information that is only available to registered users.
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Join our pnw-first mailing list which is at Yahoo Groups.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/pnw-first/ This is a mailing list where all of the mentors and team leaders hang out. It is pretty low volume, but a great way to connect with all of the other teams in our area.
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If you register on this site, a set of contact information appears at the bottom of this page. Your FRC State Chairman and Regional Director can help answer your questions.
Meetings and Events
Usually starting around July, we start holding monthly mentor / team leader meetings. Check our events schedule. We try to do these on the last Thursday of the month from 6pm to 9pm in Redmond (Overlake area). These meetings are informal, involve pizza, and are a great chance to find out a lot more about FRC and what the other teams are doing. Highly recommended as a way for all new teams and team leaders to get tons of easy information and ideas.
Click here to see the Quick guide to starting an FRC team >>
Click here to see the calendar of FRC events >>