Over the summer (7/29-/8/1) our team was asked by East High School FTC coach, Heather Roach, to volunteer at an FTC Coach training intensive at UAA. This coach training was designed to take rookie coaches through an entire season of FTC in just 5 days. We were asked to help teach coaches and answer their questions while we all worked on our team robots. We were given our own Tetrix kit to build a robot with and compete against coaches at the end of the week.
The first day, Heather went over basics and talked about the competition and the Engineering Notebook. Alexa helped a little bit with the Engineering Notebook while the rest of the team worked on the robot. The next day, Alexa also gave a presentation with Steve Patton from Alaska Communications about the RACI Matrix. Steve discussed the business side of RACI and an overview of what it is, while Alexa showed how her FTC and FRC teams use it. They answered a lot of the coach’s questions after the presentation about running a team and what that would entail while using the RACI Matrix. For the next few days our team members went around answering coaches’ questions, providing robot design and programming feedback, and helping Heather wherever we could.
On the last day, all the coaches and our team finished building our robots and mimicked an FTC Tournament. Our team members formed a panel of judges and interviewed the coaches about their Engineering Notebooks, outreach, fundraising, robot design, etc. We debriefed with the whole group afterwards to provide feedback on how they did, and how they can coach their teams to do well in judging sessions. FRC 568 Alumnus Birch designed a fake competition field and we battled. Sadly, our team lost to a group of coaches. But, they made many connections to the coaches and FTC teams for further mentoring this season.
