[SRAWN-SUBMIT] SR2024 Issue 05

[sedders123]

sryear: SR2024
issue: 05
submission-date: 2023-11-05T00:00:00Z
publication-date: 2023-11-05T12:00:00Z

SR(A)WN Submission Thread

Student Robotics (Almost) Weekly Newsletter (aka. SR(A)WN) is a regular newsletter published by Student Robotics volunteers for volunteers.

• Keep up with what's going on in SR by subscribing to the SR(A)WN mailing list.
• Let others know about what we've been up to by submitting content to the newsletter.

Content Submission

Anybody within SR can submit content to the newsletter by commenting on this thread.

The deadline for this issue is midnight UTC on 2023-11-05. Any content submitted after this deadline will be included in the following issue instead.

Please read the submission guidelines before submitting content to SR(A)WN.

Submission Guidelines

- Be inclusive! This is a newsletter for all volunteers, so please try not to assume knowledge (technical, or of specific activities within SR). - Please follow the [code of conduct](https://opsmanual.studentrobotics.org/about-the-charity/code-of-conduct) when writing and submitting content. - SR(A)WN is a public newsletter. Please don't submit any sensitive or inappropriate content. - If additional help is required for something, you can **embolden** it to indicate this to volunteers. - Please use [Commonmark Markdown](https://commonmark.org/help/) where possible when writing content. Some formatting may be stripped or changed during editing, or by the newsletter template. - Please use alt text when submitting images to the newsletter, as some mail clients may not be able to read HTML.

[Alexbruvv]

Buddies for new volunteers

With a bunch of new volunteers joining us over the past couple of months, we'd like to pair up new volunteers with more experienced volunteers (buddies) to get them familiar with what we're up to.

The role of a buddy is to:

• Welcome new volunteers to attend their first meeting and give an introduction to what the team is up to
• Have an initial video call before the meeting to bring the new volunteer up to speed and to give them a friendly face of someone in the meeting
• Make the new volunteer aware of upcoming in-person events
• Contact them approximately once a month to check in
• Answer questions the new volunteer may have, where possible

If you're interested in becoming a buddy, please sign up here!

[PeterJCLaw]

Mentoring

With the competition well underway, we aim to aim to provide support to teams in many different ways. One of the most beneficial to teams is to have a volunteer mentor visit them on a regular basis.

Mentoring is an opportunity for you to get to know a team and to grow your communication and team working skills, as well as help them improve their robot.

The role of a mentor is to guide a team towards good solutions for their robot, provide assistance where they might need it as well as help them understand the kit, the rules and the competition as a whole. This doesn't mean that you need to know everything about these yourself (it's completely fine not to know things!), rather you will guide them towards finding the information for themselves.

The team will always be supervised by their team leader (usually a teacher), so you can focus on supporting them with their robot.

We have some guidance for mentors at https://studentrobotics.org/runbook/volunteering/mentor-guidance/. If you've not mentored a team before we're very happy to support you in doing so, if you like you can be paired with another mentor who has more experience.

If you're interested in becoming a mentor, please sign up!

[sedders123]

The Competition Team Needs You!

As we gear up for the competition we're once again looking at assigning Area Owners and Deputies. To help us organise the competition, we've split up the necessary tasks into different areas each with an Owner and Deputies. They are responsible for ensuring tasks are completed (not necessarily doing all the tasks on their own!). We have Owners for each of the areas, listed below, and are looking for people that may be interested in becoming a Deputy.

Area	Owner	Deputies
Health & Safety	Scarzy
Marketing Liasson	James
Mentoring	Andy Busse
Teams	Jake	Peter
Kit Liason	Will
Event logistics	Will	James
Livestreaming	Anton
Production	Jake
Game	Alistair
Volunteer	Andy B-S	Antoine
Simulator	Peter

If you're interested in getting stuck in, or want to know more about what the role of a deputy entails, just reach out in #competition-team in Slack

[sedders123]

Virtual Competition Announced

Following on from last years success we're running a Virtual Competition as a part of SR2024. Teams will submit their code and we'll run simulations pitting their virtual robots against the other teams before livestreaming the matches on our YouTube channel on the 9th March 2024.

[sedders123]

Horsham November Tech Day a Success

A huge thank you to everyone who attended the Horsham Tech Day, the event was a great success with both teams in attendance making a huge amount of progress! There's still time to sign up to help out at our upcoming tech days if you haven't already.

• 9th December - Southampton (University of Southampton)
• 20th January - Horsham (Red River Software)

• 2nd March - Cambridge (Raspberry Pi Foundation)

  We need volunteers in order to run these Tech Days, please sign up to volunteer if you're able to help out!