The Inventioneers Top 10 Tips for the FLL Off-Season

We are taking the next couple of months to share our best advice for the off-season. The months between your last tournament and the September release of the new challenge can be a real FLL goldmine if you use them wisely! Here's our next tip:

Tip #4

Start a website to help people learn more about your team. You can share your projects on your website, too! It also can be a way to help people contact you and can even help with fundraising. Your website can be free – Google has free websites and there are lots of other free sites, too. Websites designed by kids are always just a little more creative (sorry, our own bias), so have fun (final review by a coach is required before posting the site, though).

You can post team updates, videos, and introduce your team members. Remember to keep privacy in mind - we list team members' first names only. Check out our website at http://www.theinventioneers.com/!

The Inventioneers Top 10 Tips for the FLL Off-Season

Here's the next tip in our series of tips for the off-season:

Tip #3
If you are considering starting an FLL team, get started now instead of waiting until August or September. As a rookie team, look for off-season events and tournaments for your team participate in. The Inventioneers will be hosting an off-season tournament for new rookie teams and are willing to help teams organize scrimmages for fun and experience.

In this post, we're highlighting a new team that started in January 2010. Join us in welcoming the Mount Zion Christian School team to the FLL family! They have been meeting since the beginning of the year and are gearing up for our off-season tournament. We joined them for a team meeting to introduce them to FLL and to share our personal recommendations for a successful season with them. They are excited and can't wait to get to the robot!

The Inventioneers Top 10 Tips for the FLL Off-Season

One of the things our team has done over the course of this year is develop a series of Top 10 Lists to help new teams have a fun and successful rookie season. We'll be posting some of these tips here on our blog. We're starting with the first tip from our newest list -

The Inventioneers Top 10 Tips for the FLL Off-Season

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Tip #1:

After a short break from the local and state tournament season, get back on track! We recommend you meet at least once a month for team-building activities like the ones used in teamwork judging sessions. We’ll be posting some ideas over the next few weeks. Here’s a popular one to start with: build the tallest structure possible using dried spaghetti and mini marshmallows. A good twist on this would be to see how much weight the structure could support.