Dear LCEC members,
Hi, I’m Aidan! Not only was I this year’s driver for the REEFSCAPE bot, but it was also my first year at FRC. Being my first year, my mechanical and programming skills, though improved, have not defined what I thought was a successful personal rookie year. Instead, it was being able to develop social and communicative skills that I had not had before joining FRC. I start with this, because my priority as FRC Director would lay in two things: collaboration and communication. Collaboration is the mainstay of any good team. It would be my goal to include people in ideas for projects, such as next season’s robot, especially if they are new. Increased collaboration, with small “end of the session” talks would make people feel more a part of the general process of creating a robot. This would also ensure that any new people who join the club will want to participate, as rather than assigning a mundane task to them that may steer them away, they will have an actual contribution to the final product; they can look at the robot, and go “I made that.” Though collaboration would be a priority, that would only work with proper communication. In regards to enhanced communication, an attentive schedule or agenda may be made in order to keep people on track, and give people direction when they walk into the shop that day. This would allow us to stay on task a whole lot more, and be able to have a more complete product during the season. Letting people be able to communicate their ideas would be crucial to this as well, as with contributions to the design of the robot made by people other than the lead engineer, would be both beneficial personally for those people, and also for the efficacy of the robot as a whole. Overall, as FRC Director, I would be able to ensure that goals are met and adequately expressed, along with placing a greater emphasis on teamwork in order to let everyone have a go at being an engineer.