Re: Sustaining a FIRST Team
 

It seems that communication via email is something that many teams struggle with. I'm running into a similar issue with my students regarding email, and I've talked to a few other teams who have the same problem.

It's interesting to me that this generation of plugged-in, tech-savvy students rarely uses email.

Even more mind boggling is that probably 1/3 of my students aren't even on Twitter or Facebook. This leaves text messaging. ...which obviously is not a great way to send a large amount of information.

What I have been doing with my team, with growing success:

1. Emailing the team with important updates 1-3 times per week, to help them get used to checking it.
2. On super important emails, I make sure to BCC all parents and politely ask them to remind their children to check their email.
3. Include "ACTION REQUESTED" in the subject line of emails that require responses (this suggestion was given by a parent who deals with emails in the business world on a regular basis).
4. Use the app Remind101, which sends out a massive group text message. It's super easy to use!
5. Include Google Forms in emails when I need to know who is going to attend what event, or who is interested in leading up an event.
6. And lastly, I have been starting every meeting with, "Raise your hand if you received the email that I sent out on (fill in the date). If you have not read your email, log into a computer now and respond to anything you missed."

Gradually, all of this has helped my students remember to check their emails and respond in a timely fashion. It's still a work in progress. There are still some kids who come up to me at meetings and say, "I just don't check my email."
I usually respond with, "Well, that's the main form of communication for our team, and when you get to college you will need to check your email multiple times a day, so let's help you get in the habit now."

Also, like your mentor, I was super frustrated with this mentality at first. And then I just started looking at it as a game. So far my score in this game is increasing every week. I'm confident that come the start of school, my students will be well-trained in the art of communication via email.

Re: Sustaining a FIRST Team
 

Our team was started a few years before my time (2007). When inherited responsibility, I was left with a declining program, one that was sure to die you in a few years. At the time, we were partnered with another local high school, one that given it's condition and student population, would not be able to sustain a FIRST team by itself.

Our biggest problem is retention. I'll be happy when we don't go from 40 kids to 10 kids (including veterans!). For me, that is 30 kids who loose the excellent experience that is FIRST. Our solution to this problem, is to keep kids actively engaged. The three main reasons that kids drop out of our team is that: they cannot make meetings, they are inactive, and feel like they cannot learn what is required. We have solved this problem by providing challenges that build up to FRC. First we have FLL, where high-schoolers can earn NHS hours for mentoring middle-schoolers. Next we have VEX, where new members run the build season. Then FRC comes along, and the students are ready to go. This solves the learning curve and the inactivity problem. The scheduling problem is handled on a case by case basis.

For communication, a world where students do not check email is terrible. Facebook groups provide a easy platform to give out messages. Most kids have the app on their phones, and get notified immediately. Event planning and group messaging is also convenient.

As far as growth is concerned, the only workable solution we are pursuing is combining teams. We are combining our team, which has a stagnant growth but excellent resources, with another team with good growth that has lost its school. Combining both teams allows us to cover a larger territory, and provides more opportunity for growth into our community.

Parents are also a key to the problem. Living in an area where many jobs are provided by companies like Intel, Microchip (runs FIRST and VEX in Arizona), Google, Amazon, etc, they can understand the value of FIRST. Parents are often the source of inspiration, mentors, company relationships, free pizza, and ... funding (tax credit donations). We allow (urge) parents to join our Facebook group, and also include them in our weekly emails. They are encouraged to pop in during build season, watch, help, and provide moral support.

Ultimately, the problem can defined as a lack of inspiration. If a kid is inspired, they will check his/her email, and will show up to meetings. But until our programs inspire them, the burden is on the team to adapt to the uninspired masses. Otherwise, how else can a student adapt to a foreign environment, a new mindset?

Good luck to you, and we wish you the best for the 2014 (water) game!

Re: Sustaining a FIRST Team
 

Our team can relate to the problems OP is having. After this past season all but 2 of our students graduated. Our team is based out of a half-day high school career center and while we accept students from any area schools (6+ sizable schools at that), we have found it very difficult to grow the team beyond about 10 members in recent years (and only about half of those have been particularly active members).

Re: Sustaining a FIRST Team
 

Nathan makes many good points in his post... I boiled it down to a few that began to align with some of my thoughts when I first read the OP.

Bingo...

While an amazing group of student leaders will bring a team to its biggest successes, teams need a very strong mentor backbone to not only mentor the students, but to support and sustain the team in years where the student leadership may not be able to be as strong.... and to support eachother from year to year. In my now 17 years and 3 teams in FIRST, I have come to realize that each team may only have one incredibly capable, incredibly strong, self motivated and independent student leader come along maybe once every 10 years IF they are lucky. There are some phenomenal students in FIRST, but those that are capable and motivated enough to really drive a team toward elite style success... those that would be able to immediately go on and build a new team, are much much more rare than I once expected.

Thus, every team needs a strong mentor backbone. And I would argue that 1-5 mentors is not enough. In 90% of teams, a lone mentor will be burnt out in 2-3 years. 5 continuous mentors will be burnt out in 5 years. You need a good solid lead mentor, a lead mentor sidekick, 3-5 incredibly dedicated mentors (/parents), and another 5 or so that can fill in when things get really busy. That means every team with ~30 students need 10 mentors to really have a strong team.

Can you work with less? Of course. And there are models that do. Some of the more curriculum based ones are probably ok, but even if you look at the model referenced earlier (1717) they were more capable and better off when they brought in more mentors.

This type of backbone is exactly the reason so many of the college teams struggle. I watch Clarkson every couple of years go in waves, because they are forced to rely on mentors that turn over at least every 4 years. They have built some amazing robots, and some not so amazing robots, have run some amazing programs, and had some off years. Teams like WPI are much more sustainable because they have non-college leads like Colleen and Ken and Francis that can help keep consistency and form a backbone year after year.

Plus these mentors help students learn how to be leaders, they help push the students outside their comfort zone. If you have a 1/20 mentor/student ratio, that mentor is not going to be able to spend enough time to really grow and develop each kid individually. The closer you get to a 1/1 ratio, the stronger your students can grow (assuming you have mentors with the correct mindset).

You want a more sustainable team? Find and recruit more dedicated and passionate mentors... and have them help you grow your student base.

Re: Sustaining a FIRST Team
 

First of all, thanks to everyone who dedicated some time to reply; you've all given some very helpful suggestions, and I've shared a few with our coach. He's willing to work with me and try to implement some of them, or to change a bit of how we run things. :)

Okay, since there're too many posts to quote individually, I'll just break down my responses into subjects:

Mentors/adult leadership: When we founded this team in 2011, we actually had two coaches and several regularly-attending mentors. Everything was easily taken care of with that system; no individual really got overwhelmed with tasks. But our second coach had to quit in 2012 because his wife gave birth to their child, and he wanted to be around for his new daughter. We still have many mentors who show up on a fairly regular basis, a few of which are parents or grandparents of students. However, our problems lie in the way the school district has set things up.
Because of all of those school shootings and other horrible incidents that have happened out of state over the past few years, our district is really pumping up its security measures. According to district policy, our coach is the only valid/official adult that students are authorized to be left alone with, because he's a school employee. In order to authorize other adults with this same responsibility, they would have to undergo fingerprinting, background checks, signing contracts, and attend specialized training. This whole process would take months to complete, and it costs that mentor several hundred dollars to do. No one wants to dedicate that kind of time and money. Technically, we're not even supposed to let our other mentors into the building after hours.
We've tried asking around the district for other school employees that might be willing to fill in the second coaching position, but none of them really have time to dedicate to our team. So as of now, we rely on our coach for everything. Without him around, we cannot hold meetings. Without him, we cannot operate machinery. Without him, we cannot be at competitions. Without him, we cannot transport our robot anywhere. Without him, we cannot approach sponsors or attend community events or fundraisers.
I understand the school's reasoning, but it's getting ridiculously hard to operate under these restrictions. It's no wonder he's getting burned out; he's the one that has to be there for everything, the one that has to do everything for us on top of his teaching job (and these past two years, he's had to teach 5 separate subjects in 6 class hours due to budget cuts).

Early robotics programs: We're currently in the process of starting an FLL league with the local recreational center, and I've heard that there's a possibility we may even be teaming up with another local FRC team (503) to run some kind of out-of-district FLL team. This would encompass students from both districts and beyond, and would allow them to tap into both FRC groups for mentoring and management.

Keeping students interested: We've been competing in a local league known as OCCRA since 2006, which takes place from September through November. The competitions start in mid-October, and our new students almost always stick around just long enough to attend them... and then quit just before FRC season. We've tried almost everything to show them that FRC is waaaay cooler than OCCRA, but they rarely stick around anyway. For new students that join after the FIRST season, we highly encourage them to go with the team to off-season events such as MARC or IRI. Those students tend to be the most dedicated, we've found. We also have a varsity letter program in place to draw in more interest, and that has given us a lot of hard-working members as well.

Recruitment: We recently attended the science festivals of two elementary schools in our district, which drew a lot interest from parents and students alike. We're also considering the possibility of setting up a permanent kiosk in one of the middle schools, which would play our "commercial" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VR_hiq5RL4) and Chairman's videos like we've done at each of our competitions this season (kids love it! We literally had a dozen children just sitting in front of the little TV, watching the same few videos over and over until they could recite them from memory at Gull Lake. At Livonia, it was the judges doing the same thing! LOL). I'll also be working with the team's new president at IRI to discuss other possible recruitment efforts: One I suggested was a "member swap" idea -- basically, for one day, we would trade our members for the members of another extracurricular club to give them an idea of what robotics is all about (and vice versa). It'd be a fun way of sampling all the school's activities equally, and to get the different clubs to become more closely affiliated with one another. I know the art department would just LOVE to get their hands on our robot... :p

Communication: We're looking into the possibility of using one of those text services. Otherwise, we've tried most of the other email strategies.

FIRST in the classroom: Our coach actually already uses FIRST in his classroom to teach concepts and garner some interest. Every year, right after kickoff, he uses the new year's challenge to start his Quality Function Deployment unit in his engineering classes. The goal is for students to think of theoretical solutions to the game, then to analyze them against the priorities of the QFD to determine which would be the most effective design. After exams, he allows his students to play with our robot from the previous season.