The off-season is an opportunity for growth and outreach without the stress of pending competitions.  There is a page dedicated to Outreach, so we will concentrate on off-season growth here.

Last summer, we conducted some CAD training sessions for anyone who was interested.  We created several CAD training videos, and then we would meet online to help team members as they worked through the training.  We plan on continuing that, and adding additional videos.  We also held training sessions for members who were interesting in learning programming.

Off-season is also an excellent time to visit sponsors and sponsor prospects.  With LOTB we visited Farmer Machine company and Enviro Compliance Laboratories. These were opportunities for the team members to learn about STEM in the business community.

Off-season is also a good time to work on re-usable robotic components.  Last year LOTB made a change to start utilizing a chassis with Mecanum wheels.  This would have been an excellent project to attack in the off-season!  That was our plan, but we lost our meeting space during the off-season.  We have seen many other teams that use slider extensions with the ability to extend and retract in about a single second – this would be a good off-season project.