How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

I have been with team 706 for going on 10 years now. We have become increasingly more successful. This is partly due to learning how things best work on an FRC robot and putting in at least 25 hours a week during build season and nearly that many hours a week before our first competition.
I thought it would be nice for all of us to find out how many hours most teams put in per week of build season. I am not asking how many hours some individuals work but rather how many hours the team is allowed to work under team/school guidelines.
I did some searches and could not find a thread that addressed this in one place so here is a poll.
Thanks

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

We don't have any guidelines. It varies from student to student on our team. We had several students put in 70+ in week 1 of last year during prototyping. It tapers down after that but it stays above 40 hours for a least a few of them.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Also no universal guidelines. If you come every time the shop is open, you'd break 40 easily, particularly towards the end. A few people do that some weeks, but for most of us 40hr+, a good chunk is CAD or LabVIEW. (Plus a few students and a mentor spend significant time at a sponsor's shop.) The median is probably in the 25 +/- 5 range. That's 3 of the 5 nights at 3hrs and then the 8hr weekends, or the like.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

We are limited on how long the permits let us work in the scholl. The maximum we can do is about 4 hours a night on weekdays, and 8 hours on saturday. We sometimes eke a little bit of extra time out earlier and later than our meeting times here and there, so I'd say a maximum UPS workweek is 30-32 hours.

I am somewhat jealous but also relieved that we don't have an external shop with unlimited time ;)

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

We schedule 8 hours on Saturdays and three hours on Mondays with open extra hour the rest of the week except Fridays.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

We're scheduled for 26 hours per week. It often ends up being at least 10 more than that. Toward the end, we had a week that was about 68 hours.

We had students that logged over 400 hours between November and March.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Team 33 schedules 22 hours per week with our students during the build season. Our leadership and core students will typically put in considerably more than this, I would estimate average at about 36 hours/week or so. This is time where we are actually together at our build site. There is also a lot of individual time put on doing things like CAD, software, Website, documentation, etc outside of the actual on-site work.
This works for us, I have found more time in the shop can be counter-productive, and we must balance planning/designing with building/testing.
Too much of one will hinder the other, and we have a small leadership group so we need to share time between these two domains.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

1741 only schedules 24.5 hours per week [2.5 hours M-F, 8 Sat, 4 Sun], but there is often work going on for an extra hour M-Th, and a few more on Friday night, with Saturday and Sunday having more room for expansion. Because there's 2 Monday holidays in there, we usually have extra time in week 3 and the day before bag day. So I'm usually at the school 40+ hour during those 6 1/2 weeks, but we have kind of a bathtub shape average for time with a lot of hours in the first and last week.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Looking at the poll and then reading responses I wonder if the respondents who listed more than 30 hrs for the team really meant that a few core members work more than 30 hrs.

We schedule more than 20 hrs a week and a few people put in a lot extra, so I clicked less than 30 hrs.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

The answer I was really trying to get to was how many hours is your work area/school open for working on the robot during build season. I realize some students will put in more than others. I am just looking for available time.
Thanks

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

rereading the poll question I realize it was not properly worded. However, in that light lets keep it going as is to see what we get.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

In our team, we work as much as we possibly can. That means, at any time where we have access to the shop and our allowed to work, except in the middle of the night (because of sleep + adult supervision is usually a teacher that doesn't actually care about the team).
We're not allowed to work during school, which ends at 4PM, and we leave at 10PM usually on weekdays (sometimes later).
On Fridays we're only allowed to work to 4PM (because of sabbath), and start at 9am.
On saturdays we work 10AM to 10PM (we're not supposed to be allowed but we found a way around it that involves parents).

So all and all, we work 6*5+7+12=49 hours a week.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Also varies student to student for CRT 306. However as a team we usually average 40-45 hours a week. (5 Mon-Fri, 12 Sat) We keep Sunday as a day off for our students to study, spend time with family, etc.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

For most of the build season, we schedule about 18 hours per week (6-9 PM Monday, 4:30-9:00 PM Tuesday & Thursday, 8 AM-2 PM Saturday). Some students and mentors will end up spending more like 25-35 hours per week. Kickoff week and the weekend leading up to Stop Build Day are usually >40 hours, the later greatly depending on how much work remains to be done.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

The last few years we've had a build season shop schedule with 23 "official" shop hours per week, plus a couple of additional six-hour days on the MLKJr and President's Day school holidays. Unofficial shop hours will sometimes double or even triple that as the Stop Build deadline approaches.

There are a bit more than thirty defined shop sessions during the six weeks, plus a few more after Stop Build, and a student must be productive during at least half of them in order to be eligible to travel with the team. If students can find a pair of mentors to supervise them, only one thing stops them from putting in as much time as they want. The teachers try to keep track of grades, and students will be told to go home and study if they're not doing their part to maintain acceptable grades.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Our team starts at 10 hours a week and works our way up to 15 hours a week.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

We schedule 3 hrs on Tuesday and Thursday and then 8 hours on Saturday. This usually runs over a little bit and towards the end of build season we will schedule more for select groups of students and mentors to ensure completion and driver practice.

For the teams that work 40+ hours a week, do you really find it being that beneficial? I feel that with our team working a max of about 16 hours a week during the standard build season we field incredibly competitive robots and if we added more hours we would burn out and just lose productivity.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Well, our schedule is like this
6:00 - 9:30 Monday thru Thursday (14 hours)
Saturday 9:00 am to 5:00 pm (8 hours)
Sunday 11:00 am to 9:00 pm (10 hours)
for a total of 32 hours.

However, many students work on the robot from 7:00 to 7:45 am, during school, study halls, and lunch, and after school for an hour or so. Also, as the build season progresses, we end up using as much time as the school lets us, which is

6:00-10:30 Monday thru Thursday (18 hours)
Saturday 9:00 to 9:00 (12 hours)

Sunday 9:00 to 9:00 (12 hours)

for a total of 42 exhausting hours
(even more if we meet at a mentors house, or if it's a 3-day weekend).

If we did this often, we would all die, so this only happens usually on weeks five and six.

After bag/tag, our team usually doesn't meet for 5 days, as we all need to spend time with our families, jobs, and homework, before they start getting too angry at us.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Could we build a robot in less time, yes. Would our team be nearly as close to each other as we are and would we be able to help as many other teams, probably not. We're also exchanging time for other resources that we don't have like lathe and mill access. Like I said this isn't the entire team, last year around 5 students probably put in that amount in most weeks and that's time with the team, they're not always working on the robot.

The way our team runs, I don't leave until the last student does (as in there are no set end times to our meetings) and normally I'm their later working on things like the blog, ordering parts, helping other teams over email, and reading CD.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

By my count, my team has around 20 "scheduled" hours for meetings (significantly more the first couple weeks-- ~30-35), but our schedule doesn't count the considerable amount of students who come in at 9AM on Saturday and don't leave until it's Sunday. I'd say the team average for "shop time" is around 25-30 hours, with some members pushing that up to 40+.

If we're counting non-shop time I think it would be a little bit scary to see what number that ended up as.

To be honest, thus far we haven't noticed our robot performance go up with more hours, mostly because we haven't really held to any sort of schedule or had any strategic plan that we held to throughout the season. Time can only get you so far. The extra time mostly goes towards getting everyone on the team comfortable with each-other.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Our scheduled time is usually around 22 hours during the first half of the season, but after the finals break it can creep up to around 30 hours per week.

That count is scheduled meeting time, some students often work outside that time frame too, and rack an upwards of 50 hours per week.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Our schedule is:

M-F: 6-9pm
Sat: 1-6pm (this is approximate, and can change year-to-year)

So, about 20 hours (I voted for <30, since we are on the edge). We never really work extra, except that we often work until midnight the last night before bag. About the only exception is a few kids have worked on something-or-other during shop class a few times a few years.

I'm frankly surprised by those who can find 50 hours in a week; when are you doing this, all day?

As far as I know, the school doesn't have any particular restrictions on when we can be there. We even usually show up on snow days when the weather is actually acceptable. This year, for example, the HS had a faintly ridiculous number of snow days, but the only one that I recall that canceled our meeting also led to the university being closed, and I couldn't get out my driveway to get to the HS.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Our shop is usually open from 3pm until 8~10 pm M-F depending on exactly what is going on, with some nights occasionally running as late as midnight on school days. On Saturdays and other school holidays there is typically someone there from 10am to 10pm. Of course not everyone is there all of those hours. Most students will typically put in 15~20 hrs per week. As Bag day nears the more likely someone will be staying late and we have been known to keep the shop open for 48 or more hours straight the days right before bag day, working in shifts.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Our team requires all members to log 40 hours in the 6 week build season to be allowed to get field-tripped out for competition. We meet 4-~10pm weekdays and 10am-~8pm saturday. We always have 6-8 dedicated students there every single meeting.

Also, on bag up day our drive team goes on a "field trip" from school (to the lab in Computer hall) and works feverishly to finish the robot 7am-midnight

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

When our team made it to the Championship event in 2012, I did an informal poll of teams around our pit area and it seemed that most teams were putting in 20-24 hours per week on official practice times. Obviously some are putting in substantially more hours and others less.

For what it's worth, I've built a rough estimation approach that can typically determine a team's performance. The number of hours put into prior to and during the build season are one of the primary factors indicating how successful a team will be. There's just no way for a team to be consistently successful without working very hard.

Now, teams with increased resources and better machining shops in particular can produce prototype and competition parts much, much faster than some other teams. This may save them a tremendous amount of time but most of them simply use that time to produce a better robot instead of taking the time off.

One thing I'd caution folks about too is losing all perspective on this. Don't let a robot competition become a higher priority than your grades. It doesn't do the students any good to win tournaments and not get into solid college programs. It doesn't do our sponsors any good if we're not producing future technical leaders at the expense of winning a tournament.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

With the exception of an exam week during Week 3 (no scheduled classes so students build throughout the day), 2791 has in the past met Monday / Wednesday 3-8 PM and Tuesday / Thursday / Friday 3 - 5:00 PM. 16 hours a week. During crunch time we make Thursdays run until 8 PM for a 19 hour a week schedule.

Meeting on weekends is extremely unusual for us, excluding drive practice and the last weekend of build season (usually the same thing).

If you summed up our entire 2013 build season "in meeting" time, we met for around 120 hours. Lots of work was done outside of meeting times (mostly CAD / planning).

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Our official meeting times are
Monday - Friday 6pm-10pm.
But a teacher is there at 2 pm right after school and usually 2-4 students work on the robot starting at 2.

On Saturdays (and Sundays occasionally) 9/10am - 9am.

These are our favorite days because the mentors usually have had at least 3 dunkin donuts runs for coffee, and all the students have a few Mobile runs to get bottles of mountain dew.

Some of our funniest memories are from these 12hr meetings like when the wood shop decided to prank the metal shop. The wood shop mentors and students told a freshmen to go into the other room, and say that they were about to sand a battery so that it can fit in the battery holder. so the freshmen did this and even turned the sander on and slowly put the battery towards it. Not until the last second did somebody catch that was happened. Previously all that they had said was "be safe" "put your safety glasses on".

The long days are not only fun but there team bonding, and alot of work gets done.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

We usually schedule ~22 hours a week. 3 hours monday-friday, 7 on Saturday. However, there are many nights that students and mentors will stay well past the scheduled time. In fact, I was once in the shop until 2 in the morning with one mentor and one of the drivers. Most students log about 100-120 hours during build season, though some of us logged well over 200.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Officially, we are:
12PM-6PM Sunday
6PM-9PM Monday-Friday
8AM-6PM Saturday
The start times are usually fairly static, but it is common for the end times to push until as late as 10PM or 11PM.

The average student attends 10-20 hours/week of the scheduled 31 (more is required for student leaders). We try to keep the shop open as much as we can to keep the process moving (not everyone can work on the robot at once, so we might as well stagger the time so all the students can have "hands-on" time and more can be accomplished). Quite a bit of design discussion also goes on outside of build hours.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Last year was a bit of an anomaly for us in terms of hours spent. The nominal schedule was:

W, Th: 2:45-5:30
S, Su: 9a-5p

However, as the weeks went on, it became closer to:

M, T, F: 3:45-10
W, Th: 2:45-10
S, Su: 8a-10p

Holidays also followed the weekend schedule. Not everyone attended every hour, of course.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

I feel like we work "a lot" as a team (although not as much as some teams represented on CD). Our typical workweek is:

3-6 Monday-Friday
9-6 Saturday-Sunday

Which gives us a total of about 33 hours per week. We scale it back after bag to only a few days a week while making the weekend days about 10-5.

However, the four days before bag we worked:

Thursday: 8-8
Friday: 8-11 PM
Saturday: 8-1 AM
Sunday: 8 till 6 PM Monday.

That was a harrowing experience.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

I would agree 100%. Every year my grades slipped in the spring because of FIRST, and although I was accepted into the university I wanted, I do wish I hadn't let that happen

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

Typically week days are 7 - 10, allowing our mentors to get home and have some family time before greeting the build team. In the past we've taken one evening (Friday) off. Saturday and Sunday can be longer days as necessary - 11 - 5 or so.

The main thing we have seen to make a busy build season actually work, is to have different sub-teams working on different nights. Then, all team members have time for school work and other demands, mentors have time to grocery shop and do laundry, and the robot still gets built.

Re: How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol
 

We formally schedule 30 hours/week of meeting time for the team during build season. This tends to expand towards the end of the season.

Most students do not attend every meeting (school work comes first), but some people (such as CAD designers, programmers and media folks) put in a significant number of off-meeting hours.