Your opinions greatly appreciated.
 

Hi I'm Kyle a sophmore on FRC TEAM 4206. I am starting at least 8 fll teams at one school this year they have 5-8 grade students participating. I have already decided to seperate boys and girls. But I'm not sure if that's a great decision. I also am trying to decide if I should mix grade levels or keep them seperate? Currently 58 students have registered to be a part of it 18 girls of mixed grades. The rest are guys mixed fairly evenly. I am comming to the commmunity to ask for any advice/opinions and suggestions you might have on anything and everything related to fll from fundraising to robot build. And team dynamics. Thank you.

Re: Your opinions greatly appreciated.
 

Kyle,
It has been my experience that girls outpace boys in this age bracket. More importantly, the age differences are much greater hurdles. Having a girl's only team did benefit us one year, but having mixed teams in other years worked better for all.

Re: Your opinions greatly appreciated.
 

In our experience some girls tend to work better on girls only team while other girls work better on mixed group. I can tell you that on a mixed group you will have girls be a little shy to speak up in front of the group. (could be an individual problem?) but it really it is something that could go either way.

One idea that might work is to hold mini training session before teams are decided and see who work well and who doesn't and form teams according to that.

Re: Your opinions greatly appreciated.
 

Thank both of you for your input, I think I'll have that mini training session and split them up after as a follow up question, is there any specific advice about anything you have for me?

Re: Your opinions greatly appreciated.
 

Make sure they get proper experience especially with sensors! If they start using sensors they will have an easier time when they move on up to FTC and later in FRC. Also don't undermine the project and core value aspects. Yes they tend to be more forgotten but they are also some of the most important. So find or make time for team building exercises. One final note if you can send a member from your FRC team to each team to act as mentors, the kids really look up to FRC students and it really makes a difference.

Re: Your opinions greatly appreciated.
 

Why have you decided to split them up? I'm sure you have a good reason, but I would question any splitting of teams among gender or any similar lines unless there's some issue.

Re: Your opinions greatly appreciated.
 

I use a number of different metrics for grouping...

• Grade/Age
• Academic Level (low correlation with grade/age)
• Social/Emotional Maturity (moderately correlated with age/grade)
• Experience level with building in general, competitive youth robotics in general, and specific program (FLL in your case)
• Type of experience desired (fun/relaxed/learning vs. highly competitive)
• Area of interest (project, programming, mechanical, etc. - however you define roles)
• Ability to work independently including staying on task, prioritizing tasks, problem solving, and personal organization skills (highly correlated with academic level, moderately correlated with age/grade)
• Requests from students and parents (from students usually to be with friends, from parents to be with siblings to minimize the number of trips they need to take each week)
• Edited to Add: Personality conflicts. This is rare in my experience, but some kids just can't work together because 1) they clash constantly or 2) they get each other amped up and off task. There's a time for learning to work with people you really don't like, but I find that in season FLL is not that time. Your mileage may vary.
• Also Edited to Add: Meeting availability. File this under practical considerations. If all of your teams meet at once this won't matter, but if you do multiple meeting rotations the evenings on which students are available is something to consider when grouping.

I'm of the school of thought that kids should be primarily grouped by type of experience desired and ability to work independently. This minimizes the strife and angst within teams as kids that are more relaxed or still learning don't feel pressured by their highly competitive teammates, and highly competitive kids don't get frustrated by feeling like their more relaxed teammates are dragging them down. It also allows coaches to more easily give each kid the type of instruction that they need most, as the coaching techniques for new learners vs experienced or competitive kids are very different. If you know the kids personally or are able to run a camp or workshop as a sort of tryout to get to know them a little better, this isn't a terribly difficult thing to do. If you don't know the kids personally, I find age/grade based grouping is the way to go. If you have more than one group of kids per grade you can either further split them up based upon desired role (so you don't end up with 8 kids that all want to do the same thing on one team) or by academic level (I usually use reading level, not because that matters particularly, but because it's fairly highly correlated with ability to work independently which effects the best coaching style for the students/team).

The other school of thought I have tried is mixing age and ability levels on each team. This was challenging in a number of ways and I don't recommend it. Instead, I have a "high ability" and a "low ability" team meet concurrently so they can learn from and help each other without causing too much strife within each team.

You can decide whether or not you will take requests for grouping. I usually do, and it hasn't come back to bite me yet (been doing this since 2005). I do make a disclaimer that I don't guarantee I can fulfill a request, but I haven't had issues so far. Parent requests to keep siblings on the same meeting schedule I can usually accommodate by putting the siblings on different teams in the same meeting rotation. Not taking requests is also perfectly valid (learning to work with diverse people, making new friends, etc.).

As far as gender based grouping - If the girls get excited about it I see no harm (but not necessarily a benefit either). I've found that younger girls (ages 8-10) sometimes get excited about a girls-only team. I usually try and get them into coed teams as they get older (ages 11+) only because I use so many other grouping metrics that I can generally form more balanced teams without the additional gender based requirement. That said, if I ever had older girls request a girls only team I can't imagine I'd say no.

In general, I would recommend keeping the age gap between the youngest and oldest on a team no larger than 2 years. Minimizing the gap makes it more likely that kids will have similar needs as far as coaching style goes, making it easier to fulfill individual instructional needs. There's also a BIG jump in social and emotional maturity around age 11 usually, so keep in mind that a grouping of 10-12 year olds may have more issues than a grouping of 8-10 or 11-13 year olds. This isn't a rule, as some teams operate with a larger gap just fine. You know your kids better than than we do and thus are best qualified to make the decision. If you can, parents and teachers can be a great resource to help with grouping (teachers especially, since they do this every day).

Re: Your opinions greatly appreciated.
 

The reason I chose this to do this is because within other FLL and FRC teams I have noticed that sometimes the males push the females out of leadership positions and sometimes females think that they are not allowed to be in a leadership position by separating by gender my hope is to show that the females are just as capable if not more capable of being in the leadership positions. It also does the same for the males. I was going to split them like that at least for one year to show and make an example that anyone can be in the lead they just have to work hard for it.

Re: Your opinions greatly appreciated.
 

If the more reserved kids being pushed out of leadership roles is a concern, you could consider doing a "leader of the week" type system. This would ensure that all kids get equal leadership experience regardless of gender lines, so the more shy boys would be given the opportunity to step up as well. You can let the kids know at the beginning of the season that each week there will be a designated leader of the week that will fulfill certain responsibilities. You can either define these responsibilities for them, or have them be an active part of the process of deciding what the leader should do. For young students without experience, you may be better off giving them the list since they won't know what's necessary anyway. The leader responsibilities can include tasks such as standing in front of the group and leading the end of meeting wrap up session, being in charge of calling on team members to keep group discussions civil and productive, recording entries in a team journal/engineering notebook/meeting minutes, deciding who should work on which tasks each day, etc.

With any sort of leadership structure in FLL, keep in mind that age appropriate expectations are really important. The vast majority of elementary age FLL students will need significant assistance with "leadership" tasks, especially at the beginning of the season, and many older FLL age students will need help as well. If the kids are expected to take on too much responsibility before they are mature enough to handle such a task the experience will probably not be a positive one and may hamper them from taking on such roles when they get older. Especially given that you have fifth graders, remember that ten year olds are very much still kids. This isn't a bad thing, I love working with that age group, but make sure your expectations of your leaders are in line with the social and emotional maturity of the student in question.

Re: Your opinions greatly appreciated.
 

I've done VEX teams for middle and high school teams for 9 years And recently VEXIQ for elementary kids. In two short posts, Allison K has taught you a masters class in management of younger roboteers.

This is the best set of postings on this topic, the NEMO people should grab this as a base document.

Thanks Allison, that was simply *just great*

Re: Your opinions greatly appreciated.
 

Thank You! I think I will go with the leader of the week system and might also try and promote a natural leadership by allowing kids to take on more responsibilities and letting the true leaders emerge.

As to creating a team with "more motivated" and "less motivated" students the school I am doing this at is very opposed to it as they look at it as an "A team" And a "B team" the environment they strive for is one where no one is better all are equal. Sometimes I agree with this other times I disagree.

Moving onto another topic...fundraising.

In FRC I as a student
-find a contact
-call the person
-set up a meeting

But with FLL students the idea of them on the phones and going out for meetings sounds almost unreasonable. I do have to worry about their safety and well being. The only way I know how to fundraise is like that. How do your teams fundraise?

Re: Your opinions greatly appreciated.
 

Disclaimer: I don't have any great fundraising advice because my direct answer to your question is they don't. High school aged students do fundraising for their programs, but I very rarely have the younger kids fundraise. I haven't found that the process benefits the young kids much, it's stressful and time consuming for them and turns some kids off before they even start, it's stressful and time consuming for parents who are already bombarded by requests to fundraise, it's stressful and time consuming for me, and they have plenty of time in high school to learn to fundraise once they know what the program is about. I make sure they have all of the resources they need (kits, registration fee, shirts, software, etc.) with funds from grants that I apply for or parent funded pay-to-play fees, and then if they want something extra (special parts, cool team gear, promo items) they fundraise that smaller amount. When I have families with multiple children or families on free or reduced lunch I subsidize the cost for them out of revenues I get from day camp.

Fundraising in FLL is a very different beast than FRC for two key reasons. The first (and obvious) is that the students are younger. The second is that you do not have three months of the school year to fundraise before the season starts as FLL kicks off within weeks of the start of the school year (or in some areas, the same week school starts).

Additionally, before you get started fundraising, you need to do some groundwork with regards to planning and budgeting. How much money are you going to need and when will you need it by? And before you can do that, you need to determine program dynamics such as number of students per team and your expected attrition rates. For the sake of simplicity I made a spreadsheet assuming 8 students per team (which is the maximum I run) and zero attrition (all 58 students will complete the season) which works out to 8 teams. The spreadsheet is attached and works out to approximately $7,000 required. This assumes that as a new program you don't have any equipment and thus need to purchase kits. It does not include computers, supplies to build tables, shipping and handling, sales tax, promotional items for events, any more than one event per team, or any budget for project supplies. If any of these are erroneous assumptions you can adjust as needed for your program. Though it does add up to a significant amount when you are organizing a large cluster of teams, the good news is that the per student total is more manageable than FRC. Anyway, basic budgeting done.

Now we can move on to addressing the timing and age issues. As timing is quite the logistical hurdle, I'll start with that. Of the $7K total, approximately $6K of that is required before the students actually start meeting to secure team registrations, robot kits, software, and field set up kits. Taking into account the time required for shipping and handling, it would probably be wise to have equipment ordered by early August (depending on when school starts in your area). August 1st is a reasonable fundraising deadline (September 1st is the latest I would be comfortable with, your expectations may vary). The key take away here is that if students will be involved in fundraising, they must be engaged over the summer months. Edited to Add: They can fundraise over the course of the fall if the school is willing to front money for purchasing equipment and team registrations, but that may backfire on you if fundraising doesn't come through.

As far as age appropriate expectations, boy scouts and girl scouts is a good example of what's reasonable for younger students (under age 13 or so). Note that although the students do the actual "boots on the ground" work 1) there is always at least one adult present and 2) the program is very solidly set up for them and is organized well in advance with products, marketing materials, ordering forms, and shipping and storage of product. Also, the kids have very little actual selling that they need to do. Everybody already knows why girl scout cookies are so great. A precocious youth with salesmanship skills will do amazing, but even a young shy youth can be successful simply by standing at a booth in a uniform and looking cute. In my experience, there isn't an equivalent of this in FIRST. The lightbulbs are offered, but they aren't a well known product by the general public and LED lightbulbs are available in stores for the same price, or less, than what a team can charge for each bulb. In general, fundraising with this age group is very parent/mentor/adult driven. Keeping that in mind, here's a few ideas you could try...

1) Do the same cold calling of companies you do with FRC, but ask the parent to do the call with their student present. Provide all the marketing materials and do a parent/student training session beforehand. Some parents may be willing to ask their place of employment.
2) Have your FRC team members host a week of summer camp for K-8. Grades 5-8 can do FLL training activities and K-4 can do LEGO club type activities. $100 for a one week half day camp is a good base line, adjust up or down depending on the socioeconomic demographics of your area. The catch-22 is that you need equipment to run camp but you are running camp to afford equipment.
3) Most kids can plant flowers by age 10. Consider advertising to the school or community that you will plant flowers for x amount per flower, and be sure to emphasize the point that it's a fundraiser. You may be able to convince home improvement or garden stores to donate flowers, or at least give you a discount. Watch that you don't overwork kids or let them get dehydrated, and be prepared to do some replanting or touch up work if they get tired and start doing sloppy planting. The savvy businessperson would plant annuals so that you can make the money every year.
4) Host a parent's night out. Charge $10-$20 per child for an evening of fun and games while mom and dad can go out for the evening. FRC students can be the games staff while a few teachers/parents/adults are on site for safety reasons.

Hopefully this helps! You may already have all that information under control (in which case thumbs up) but so long as I'm on a roll I figured I'd put it out for anybody else that may stumble across this thread eventually.

Re: Your opinions greatly appreciated.
 

WOW! I would just like to take a second to thank you Allison! You have reminded me how helpful the Robotics Community is and how help is only a question away. For now you have answered all my questions, but I am sure to have more. Thank You!