Our Bookkeeping Group this season consisted of three team members who chose this specialty because they liked paying attention to detail and organizing, writing and public speaking, and art and design.  They felt these were their biggest strengths and would benefit the team by focusing on everything that did not pertain particularly to the building of the robot and the programming to run it.

 

The year started out slowly because we had no prior knowledge to build on other than being in the FIRST Lego League during previous years. As the season continued we got more serious because after some research, we felt we understood what our tasks needed to be.  We began by focusing on getting journal pages for the Programming, Robot Build, and Bookkeepers to fill out daily to record their goals and achievements. We made enough copies for them to fill out for each practice during the whole season.  This worked great.  The only thing we might change next year is have each group enter their information electronically right away. Our group has been transcribing it to keep things more organized.

 

Once this was done, we began to research more ways to promote FIRST in our community and school.  To name a few, we created a robotics game to be played at our school’s game night, made fliers to pass out at our communities Christmas open house, and held demonstrations of our FTC robot to students from our school.

 

We also made a list and sent out letters asking businesses to sponsor us, wrote thank you letters, made a banner for our team, designed key chains to pass out at competitions with our team number on it, took pictures, kept track of our team budget, and organized the Engineering Notebook.

 

There were a couple things that we struggled with.  At the beginning of the season we reached out to other teams to answer questions for us.  The only response was to say they were busy and would get back to us.  That never happened.  So, we forged ahead and have done our best.  Most of our team are involved in multiple activities such as sports, music, and student council.  Our time is so limited that most of what we do must be done during robotics practice.  After a long day, sometimes it is hard to keep our focus.

 

Despite our lack of understanding at the beginning of the season, we are pretty surprised at what we all accomplished and are proud of the work we’ve done.