Hi-
My daughter goes to a school that does really well in FIRST robotics competitions, they got first in FTC Internationals a couple years back and consistently place very highly. However, the schedule is packed. On Mondays they have a meeting from 5-7:30, Tues and Thurs is 5-9:30 and Saturdays 12-6, with Sundays used as the competitions get closer. She is interested in this, and has some basic programming skills and to apply, applicants need to write an essay and interview. We are just wondering, is it worth it? She has all honors, pre-IB (MYP) classes (her school is IB DP in 11th and 12th), has some other commitments but not too many (dance for 3-4 hours a week is the main one), but is interested in other clubs like Forensics, HOSA, Model UN etc, as well (these don’t meet as often, only once or twice a month, except forensics which is once or twice a week.) She has had experience juggling multiple ec’s (Mathcounts, SciOly, Quizbowl in middle school), wants to do robotics, but isn’t sure yet.
Basically, we are looking at this for college, but just also to see if this would impede any of her other opportunities in high school. She is currently signed up for a lot of other clubs as our general advice seems to be to sign up for many clubs in 9th while you have time, and pare down later, with no definite passions just yet.
I don’t necessarily agree about loading up on clubs in 9th grade. It is paunful to cut back when it gets overwhelming later on. My D2 did robotics, and it is consuming – but was a great experience. I do think it was helpful in admissions, too (she now goes to Harvey Mudd).
@intparent Thanks for your reply! The plan isn’t really to load up on too many, just to go to the first 1/2 introductory meetings. After that, probably around the beginning of September, she’ll only do 3 or 4.
No problem. She ended up doing FIRST, Quiz Bowl, fencing (club outside of school, pretty flexible club so she didn’t have to go if she was super busy – MUCH easier to deal with than school athletic teams, which her sister did), self studied for the US Biology Olympiad, and was in the school writing club. She did speech freshman year as well (dropped more because she wasn’t so good at it, not for lack of time). And she had summer stuff – entomology and some summer programs.
Mine didn’t join. She thought I was a pain. She had to wait ours and ours and never got to do anything fun. Plus the fund raising stuff. More BS. I have a kid that she does what she likes, nobody can talk her into anything. I wonder where did she she that trait. I have to think hard about it.
I’m also curious about the time involved in FTC. In particular, I’m curious about the time for FTC (small robots) vs FRC (big robots).
Our school recently “retired” its well-known FRC team, which only seniors could participate in. Some juniors, including my son, are considering starting an FTC team this year. We don’t really know what the time commitment for FTC is, since the season is longer and the robots are smaller. However, we hear that the teams need to be smaller – like 4-6 kids for FTC vs. 20-30ish kids for FRC. I’d guess the fundraising is less; the FRC team needed about $100K.
The retired FRC team pretty much consumed all the seniors’ time for about 15 weeks. They had dinners delivered at school and many students kept sleeping bags and several changes of clothes at the school for the nights they were there too late to drive home safely. Many of those kids only had 2-3 non-robotics classes left to take as spring semester seniors, because they knew in advance to frontload their classes in advance with the plan of being on the team senior year.
So, FRC is kinda crazy (but my son was really looking forward to it ), so we are wondering how FTC compares. His list of class and EC commitments as a junior is pretty crazy already.
One of my daughters was captain of a FIRST Robotics team. The other was involved in sports. By far, sports was the greater time commitment.
The robotics team required a students to put in seventy hours during build season – approximately seven weeks – to travel with the team. For most students this worked out to two evenings per week and some time on Saturday. Some students put in lots more hours. Some had difficulty making the seventy.
Each FRC team has its own culture. Your D should think about how she would “fit” with the school team. Also, as a girl in a heavily male activity, it helps to go with an idea of what she wants to do: program, electrical, mechanical. With some teams, girls spend less time with hands on the robot and more with presentations, fundraising, and marketing. Which is fine if that is what they want to do. But if not, they may need to be assertive in asking for build tasks.
My daughter was involved in this her senior year. She was also in 2 Spring sports (captain of one) so she was allowed some slack when she had conflicts.
I think it was an incredible experience for her. She got to hang around with other kids interested in engineering and also with the adult mentors who were all working engineers.
What they produced was just phenomenal. I found our regional event just amazing. She was asked to function as an Ambassador at that event and escorted some of the big corporate sponsors through and explained the game and how her team had approached the project.
A whole variety of skillets are needed, from hardcore programming to newsletters and youtube documentarian.
As long as your daughter is legitimately interested and would work hard when she had time I suspect they would welcome a female in 9th grade and try to make it work for her. Our daughter clearly was eager to be involved but had the time constraints from her sports and they were able to work around those just fine over the several months. She would not trade the experience for anything.
She should really have a passion for it. If she is on a competitive team it will be come her one and only EC priority during the season It is extremely rewarding, but is by design, an all-in commitment.
My D was on a FIRST Lego League team that did well at the state level. The competitions created lots of conflicts with other activities like Science Fair and History Fair ( Why have a competition the same weekend as state Science Fair ?) We got the impression that competitions were scheduled assuming FIRST was the only commitment.
As the team progressed to higher and higher competitions the commitment just went up and the season seemed to have no end. The parents were all secretly relieved when the team just missed being invited to Worlds (not another month of this . #:-S )
She was invited to join a competitive FTC club but declined so she could have other activities related to her HS. The FTC team did really well but, one of the boys from her FLL team that did join had his Dad pressure him to drop Marching Band because he felt his grades were dropping due to being over committed. My daughter has thanked me more than once letting her decide to not continue on the FTC.
Great activity for the right kid, but don’t push too hard.
"She is currently signed up for a lot of other clubs as our general advice seems to be to sign up for many clubs in 9th while you have time, and pare down later, with no definite passions just yet. "
My D took this approach and it has worked out really well for her. She surprised herself by finding a passion for math tutoring (will tutor for all 4 years). She also dropped out of some clubs she thought she would really like but ended up not being a good fit for her (they will not go on here applications).
My daughter did more at her summer at MIT, lots more hands on experience than her Robotics. I think also for the fact that she never had any previous experience in robotics was what helped her getting accepted to the summer program.
I found clubs to be not as impressive, but lots of kids want to sign up for everything. My kid also did math tutoring and still do it in college for pay.
Wowsers! 100K? No wonder our school didn’t have a FIRST team. We made do with Science Olympiad and every year it was a nailbiter hit or miss whether the district would actually fork over enough money for a bus to take them to the the state championships. Their is was always a robotics event, at least when my kids were involved, but older son learned quickly, that robotics was not his cup of tea.
FIRST is an awesome world. The commitment level for students varies depending upon each team’s program, as well as how many participants the team has. For a smaller FTC/FRC team, it can be tough because all/most of the team members are needed to help with fundraising, recruitment, marketing, programming, building, etc. Larger teams can designate members to coordinate these areas, and not all team members are needed for each area. Some larger teams are so big, they only allow upperclassmen to build and program. By the practice schedule your child’s team has, it looks like they know exactly how many hours per week they need to practice throughout the season, and have accommodated for that with that schedule. Sounds like a solid program. That said, if it is not covered in the first meeting, I would encourage your child to talk directly to the team captain/president and ask about the commitment level they expect from participants. For many programs, the team has to be the student’s first priority. My children all had other areas of interest that they were truly passionate about, but the robotics team was number one. If there was a time conflict, robotics took precedence. For the other clubs/ECs that they loved, they just couldn’t participate at the same level as they did with robotics. But no matter how well planned the robotics’ schedule is, building season is crazy intense at both the FTC and FRC levels. My kids would be at school until midnight and there were many 12 hour days on the weekends. There’s more wiggle room with the FTC schedule though as they don’t have that “ship date” deadline like FRC has so there seemed to be more intensity with our kids’ FRC teams than there was with the FTC ones.
I expect 100K far exceeds budget of most FIRST teams.
I help with a community based – as opposed to school based – team. Last year our 30K budget built the robot, paid competition registration fees, and paid for team travel/hotel bills to two regional competitions and the world championships. Of course, while our 'bots are usually reasonably competitive, we are not an elite level team.
I’ll add another kudos for FIRST and other robotics programs. Our daughters did VEX in middle school, now doing FIRST and BEST in high school, along with animatronics and some other tech umbrella stuff. It is time consuming, but it is their primary extra curricular, and they both love it and have a lot of friends who are on their teams.
It can be daunting and difficult to break into-when younger d joined the high school VEX team her freshman year she was bullied (and I mean bullied-the kid punched her in the mouth). She switched over to FIRST and didn’t have issues. Some boys don’t work well with girls, especially girls that take no crap (he said he wanted to punch her smart mouth, she dared him to do it, everyone was surprised and horrified when he followed through). Both girls have gained a lot of skills working where they are the gender minority, and for the most part have no issues with it now.
So my advice is to definitely do it, and hang tough if it is a little rocky at first. It gets better and they have such a blast at competitions!
Oh! I forgot to answer if it was worth it - My kids loved the experience! The friendships they made are still strong, and the practices and competitions taught them so many life lessons especially about leadership, teamwork, tenacity, and grace under pressure. FIRST is all about their core values of Gracious Professionalism and Cooperation, and these values were truly reflected in nearly everyone they encountered during their time in robotics. My kids are now in their college/post college years, and I can see that they have carried these values and life lessons with them into their college and work lives. But they all really, really wanted to do robotics, and were willing to put it ahead of other commitments.
The 100K figure is probably somewhat bogus, since it’s a number they threw around when “retiring” the team. It would include some teacher/staff salaries that are paid by the 4-year program, some of the maintenance on the building/machine shop/computer lab, dinners for 30-40 kids (paid by parents), and travel/hotels to 2 regionals plus championships (mostly paid by parents). There were other seniors working on a different capstone project, and some of those expenses may have been included to have a scary number. Realistically, it was probably closer to $50K.
The kids seemed to think it was worth it. Many alumni said it was the most significant part of their high school career.
I’ve also heard the $100K figure for FRC teams, and agree with Ynotgo that it is probably closer to 50K for most teams. Though maybe some of the super high-powered teams like the old Dos Pueblos one were closer to that number due to the overall cost of their extensive program. Not to scare anyone away from starting an FRC team because there are quite a few grants and sponsorships available at this level of competition. In many ways, it was harder to fundraise for the less expensive FTC.
), so we are wondering how FTC compares. His list of class and EC commitments as a junior is pretty crazy already.