13 Steps to Start a Successful STEM Racing Team

To start a completely new STEM Racing team in a place where nobody knows what STEM Racing is, is most definitely a difficult feat. Yet somehow our team did manage to build a running STEM Racing team, although with a lot of failures and struggles. I will be going through how to start a completely new STEM Racing teams even without any support from the school or anyone.

Starting All Alone

If you are anyone like me and have no one around who likes F1 or cars and aren't interested in any extracurriculars (which to be honest is a very rare situation anywhere outside of Japan) you must start with finding people.

This is one of if not THE MOST IMPORTANT step of the way. While team composition certainly varies you will want at least these members:

Someone with a lot of enthusiasm for this competition and has free time
Someone who can do / is willing to learn CAD (Fusion 360 recommended)
Someone who can do / is willing to learn marketing and pit designing

Now honestly with three members the team can run, although it will be extremely busy and haywire all the time. Depending on what your goal is (to participate in the competition, to get a certain award, to meet new people) you may change the other three members.

Options include but not limited to:

Painting / Manufacturing specialist to boost manufacturing productivity
Someone who can deal with paperwork and sending / reading long emails
A video editing / shooting expert to increase quality of content
A social media specialist that will increase quality and quantity of content
Designer to make pit displays, uniforms, and merch
etc....

Now our team has 3 engineers because we really want to make a fast car, but you could put more weight on social media or business, depending on the people you know around you.

What to do first

Since I had no idea what to do, I started off with nothing, let things flow, and I have realized that I should have done at the start. What must be understood is that this competition is not a robotics competition at all. Making the car is only like, one-third of the entire deal. Here is the whole checklist on what I believe a team should do immediately after starting.

Find an adult and a location that people can meet up and do stuff
Look through other teams' portfolios and get a grasp on the competition
Set a goal that everyone can agree on
Set a meeting with each member to find their strengths, weaknesses, best working environments, etc...
Set large milestones as when things are going to be completed
Decide on a team name
Find a time where everyone can meet up
Find a way to distribute tasks to everyone (e.g. per meeting)
Set the engineers free
Set up a Bank Account only for the team
Make logo, brand colors, uniform, headers, fonts, etc...
Decide on the WHY we are doing this competition
Make a sponsor prospectus and presentation

Once these 13 steps are completed, a team is formed. Getting funding can be done by absolutely spamming companies' mailboxes and looking for connections. Also good idea to just go to conventions and events and find more people. People are actually quite interested in this project, apparently.

In order to get sponsors the important part will be the WHY. WHY are you participating in this competitor? To prove that this region is the best in the world. Gender equality. Spreading STEM Racing. Spreading STEM education. It's okay to go and say slightly too much. People will be attracted more to dreamers than people who just say 'I'm going to participate in this event'.

Things to be Careful of

If I were to go back in time and give myself some advice it will be:

Document absolutely everything (especially meetings)
Take LOTS of pictures
Actually understand each team member
Schedule the Social Media

Documentation is key because it allows you to not only look back but also to use these in the end when making portfolios and reference then as you go. Humans do forget a lot of things, unfortunately.

Taking pictures is something I personally didn't care about at first, but then when looking back I realized that the % of good pictures was around 5 to 10 %. Perhaps I am a bad photographer, but honestly it is hard to take good pictures of the team, so take lots and lots of pictures.

Understanding teammates become obscure once we hit the stage of massive productivity where we are just passing out tasks to be done by next week, in the action, and being productive in general, but NEVER forget that your teammates are also people and are most likely less enthusiastic about STEM Racing especially if you recruited them.

Social Media was something I thought would be just a piece of cake... It was not. We run out of ideas after like a month, but the instagram and facebook algorithms aren't kind; you must keep posting to keep an account alive.

Apps to use

Chat GPT

Now the thing about STEM Racing is that... this isn't a school.

Use AI to boost productivity as much as possible.

Long paragraphs you have to write for a blog? AI. Emails that have to be formal but you don't have to be? AI. Ran out of ideas for slogans? AI.

Never forget that AI will still be around when we grow up. Learning is great and all, but some things just have go get done quick.

Canva (or Adobe)

Personally my favorite app of all time. It's completely free and with a bit of practice allows your posts on instagram to look like these:

Which will definitely boost the scores for social media content as they are well branded and actually look cool.

The app also allows you to make videos and other content really easily without much effort. The same can be done in Adobe CC, apparently, but it does cost a lot and unless you already have it or the school offers it with a large discount, I don't think it is worth it.

Wix (or any Website Maker)

It seems as if making a website will take lots of effort or cost in programming the site. The good news is, there are tons of website builders out there that you can use for free (the domain will cost a bit but not too much of a deal) and allows you to make really cool sites, like this one.

Final Thoughts

But still, the whole point of this competition is to have fun and learn. Always have a learning mindset because we will all run into trouble and challenges even Chat GPT cannot solve. No matter how the journey ends, it will undoubtedly be an excellent experience.