FLL mentoring network

Building a Network

Throughout the season, we’ve worked to give back to the FLL community (which most of us came from) in a myriad of ways. For example, we host FLL Scrimmages, mentoring sessions, summer camps, and more! We’ve helped out a ton of teams and have essentially built a network of teams that we mentor then invite to a scrimmage. Overall, it’s worked quite well as we are currently mentoring  8 teams!

FLL-C Summer Camp

To kick off our efforts to mentor teams during the offseason, we hosted an FLL-C Summer Camp from June 17 to June 22nd. Not only did this serve as a way to boost our funds heading into the season, but it also established teams that we could go and mentor once the season started. The camp was aimed at people starting FLL for the first time, while also having useful skills for those with experience. Overall, we had 25 people attend plus many parents.

FLL Mentoring

After the summer camp, we mentored a lot of FLL teams to help them get ready for the season. For example, we worked with the Rice FLL team to help them get ready for the season as well as help assemble the field. Other teams we’ve mentored include the St. Marks teams, the Skaggs Elementary FLL team, 52360 RoboGo, 52402 The Pythoneers, and 14687 Masterminds.

Metrocon FLL Scrimmage

After a two-year-long hiatus, the ACP Metrocon FLL Scrimmage returned this season on November 19th, featuring 16 different FLL teams. We offered them not only 3 separate robot matches but also a judging session. This functioned as both judging practice for volunteers for the future and for the teams to get used to giving a judging presentation before their competition started. Indeed, we had about 130 people show up, and the event was thus a huge success. We also had 8565 Technicbots do their FGC demo in tandem with our own demo, allowing students in FLL to look to what they could be doing next. We also had a guest speaker come and speak as well.

Helps Sustainability

Since most of our team members have previously done FTC either with an ACP team or with their school, mentoring different FLL in the communities who could later become our teammates is beneficial to sustain the team’s future as many of us will probably graduate to other teams. It’s a ladder: FLL-Explore to FLL-Challenge then FTC with Tier1 or us before finally moving on to 8565 Technicbots. Overall, we see the initiative to help FLL teams in the area as both a way to keep people interested in the FIRST program and as a way to give back to the community.