Hours worked
 

Any other teams keeping track of total hours worked for the season? We have the kids and mentors punch in and out. They need 100 hours to qualify for a Varsity letter. (among other requirements)

Just checked and our team so far this season has clocked a combined total of 68 days and 59 minutes of work. I know there are kids who don't bother punching in too.

Curious how it compares with everyone else.

Rich.

Re: Hours worked
 

When I was a student and we had a very small team, I would average about 36 hours a week, including weekends, and often more then that towards bag day. Now the most active members and mentors on our team probably do north of 30 hours a week.

Re: Hours worked
 

We aren't tracking them that closely, but... We have taken two days off since kick-off... Everybody put in about 25 hours kickoff weekend. Since then, we have had the shop up and running from 5-9PM every day except Saturdays and Sundays. Saturdays, we've gone from 9AM-5PM. We've taken the last two Sundays off.... So that's 97 hours of "stuff" going on so far. We've had anywhere from 15-90 kids and 1-15 mentors present at any given time.

Then, there are the hours that folks spend at home..........

Re: Hours worked
 

<cough>... did you say 90?

Re: Hours worked
 

Yeah.... And we shrunk this year....
We've had as many as 140 kids on our time over the last couple years... We'd be close to that again this year, but we share a lot of kids with the marching band. The band changed their meeting days to correspond with our training - and made attendance part of their grade... So we lost most of our band kids.

We'd like to split into two (or four??) different teams, but can only get one work space.

Re: Hours worked
 

I'm not sure if my team logs hours specifically, we track attendance, but I personally log my hours spent and I'm up to 92 hours spent on robotics since Kickoff as of last night.

I wonder how many man-hours are spent on FRC by all the team combined throughout the build season?

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We have 20-30 kids at any given time and finding jobs for them all can be difficult. My heart goes out to you trying to corral that many and keep them organized.

Re: Hours worked
 

Our shop is officially open 33 hours every week during the build season. We often have kids and mentors that put in more hours, though. There are on average 10 students and 5 mentors in the shop at any time, so that's close to 3100 man-hours in a build season.


And yeah...90 students?! We have trouble maintaining control when our full team of 20-30 students is at the shop.

Re: Hours worked
 

We do track team member attendance, but I don't have the numbers available here.

I do know my personal attendance though, I record it for work... So far this calendar year, 78 hours of volunteer time total! That includes team meetings, regional planning committee work, and LRI Training in NH. It also explains why I'm so tired every January and February...

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Well for this season we are trying something different. I wrote a website that the team logs into and out of. Keeps track of hours, students, permission slips, events, sponsors, etc. Still VERY buggy, but it is getting there.

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It's really not that bad... The toughest years were the three over which we grew from 30 to 140.... We struggled to create enough bureaucracy fast enough to keep it organized... We have very separate teams for programming, CAD, systems, mechanical, business and marketing... We are building two identical robots (competition and practice) plus repair older robots - until we desperately cannibalize them for parts (after which we fix them again)- so that we can keep multiple kids practicing driving at the same time.... Our elected VP's are responsible for setting up schedules for the kids in their subgroups and are encouraged to find smaller leadership opportunities for other veterans.. Our outreach efforts have gone through the roof... And, this year, we are trying to get a dance team going...

Frankly, I could not do it without all our mentors. I largely act as a CEO and delegate most of the work to our mentors - letting them run with things.

But, yes, there are times it can be hard to keep all the kids busy.

Re: Hours worked
 

We just broke 2000 hours for the current school year :)

787 student hours so far if we only count build season.

At this point we don't track mentor hours.

Not bad for a 17 member team.

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Team stuff... hmm, I think I'm just under 20 hours total. Not counting the commute.

Re: Hours worked
 

I don't know team hours but I do have some pretty crazy personal hours! If you count doing Ri3D that's 72 hours minus 5 for sleeping. Currently mentoring 3 different teams (4607, 4818, 4320) depending on whether I'm at college or at home. Every Saturday I put in 12 hours at home. During the week it's been sporadic but averaging around 12 hours a week. So added up that's around 103 hours give or take. Of course that doesn't account for time spent CADing and doing other miscellaneous robotics tasks in my free time. It definitely doesn't include the time I spend on Chief Delphi! I would be scared to look at those numbers.

Re: Hours worked
 

We have 70 students registered this year. We must take attendance as the team is a class in our district. We limit students to certain days so we don't have a bunch sitting around and doing nothing. I would not be surprised for our regular students to be at at least 16 hours each per week. As for myself, a few years ago I started adding up hours and quit counting at 800 for the year. This week I will have logged 24 hours by the end of tomorrow's FTC Tournament not including Inspector work.

Re: Hours worked
 

Our team has 27 scheduled hours of work each week during the build season. That doesn't include work that CAD students are doing at home, or supply runs, or Google Hangout strategy sessions on Sunday. If we average 15 students (though often its more like 25), that is around 1200 person-hours of work done on the robot so far this build season.

Re: Hours worked
 

We've tracked time for a number of years, not meeting the minimum cutoff means the team won't pay for you to attend competitions.

With respect to tracking mentor hours, we do ask our mentors, alums (both student and parent) and parents to login when they are working too. This allows us to demonstrate in real numbers the amount of support the team has beyond the students to our school board, community, sponsors.

Two of our former team members built a custom time clock for us right before kickoff. We had been using a COTS app meant for employees. The new lets users check their own hours from the clock console - so no excuse for "not knowing where they stood" the day before we leave for competition.

It also has a text feature that lets mentors send a "shop open" or "shop closing early" message. My favorite part is when mentors are logged in "shop is open" message is added to the team website and when they clock out it says "shop is closed" so kids and parents can just check the website to see if someone is there before they stop by.

Re: Hours worked
 

Oh that is a good idea. Right now we use a messaging system for the students but I could make a simple toggle for it on the admin side of the team site.

See coming to CD just makes more work. :)

Re: Hours worked
 

Our Team has 30 scheduled hours per week, but I know that I go home and CAD so I don't waste time on a computer at a meeting, and I know that the lead mentor goes home and continuously thinks about solutions to problems and our drive coach goes home and thinks about strategy... So I think it's quite a few.

Though, 180 hours to build a robot doesn't seem like a whole lot... Even if I multiply it by the number of people working during the meetings (around 10) that's 1,800 hours... Yikes.

:yikes:

Oh well. I'm sure we're not the worst of it.. right?

Re: Hours worked
 

So far this year, Team 900 Students/Mentors have logged 3949 hours. Since build season started we've had 2040 hours logged. Those numbers only count logged hours. At least one mentor never remembers to sign in, and if a student forgets to sign out they get credited for only 1 minute of time.

I also built us a time logging system for our team (and some pretty graphs). Constantly modifying/updating it. If anyone is interested it's open source and can be found here: https://github.com/FRC900/timesheet

Re: Hours worked
 

We do a similar system. I'm not sure of the total hours put in by our team as a whole, but I have put in about 15-20 hours a week starting from kickoff. Our team does other competitions throughout the year and as of now I have a total of around 150 after school hours put in.

Re: Hours worked
 

To count the time spent just since January 3rd, 2015, for myself personally, it will be 120 hours by the end of this weekend. As a team of 36 students and 9 mentors, we have a cumulative total of 2846 people-hours so far. That's an average of 63 hours per person, over the past 20 calendar days. Our top students will exceed 100 hours thus far by the end of today.

We have a total of 260 scheduled hours in the months of January, February, and March, and often stay well in excess of scheduled hours.

Re: Hours worked
 

Let's see... 5 hours Sat/Sun, 12 during the week, so 22 for somebody who shows up all the time per week. I've spent something like double that or more so far, sround 130 hours or more.
We have students constantly going in and out, and it's too much of a hassle to track them. Generally we know which kids are coming in more than others.

Re: Hours worked
 

708 started tracking hours the day before kickoff for the 45 students on the team. As of last Saturday, the average amount of hours per week range from 15-30 hours per student, with plenty of students having many more than that. The total man-hours for the team thus far are about 2540 hours excluding mentor hours.

Re: Hours worked
 

Last year we went to signing in and out, but never did much with the data. This year we are tracking it as part of eligibility for positions at competitions.

We have 13 students, and they have clocked 545 hours (since the Monday after Kickoff) before we started our long Saturday today. Individual students range from 8 to 30 hours per week.

Re: Hours worked
 

We don't have any logging system, but I know we have logged a lot of hours because our team has been running as a class for the first 3 weeks of the build season. Between first and second semester, our school has J-term, which allows us to make robotics a day-long class. It has given us tons of time and a great headstart in this first 3 weeks. Sadly now we are back to regular classes and meeting after school going into build week 4.

We had a team of 75 last year and after winning our regional and attending worlds we received 140 applications for the team. We cut the team size to 50 members, and our team is at 90 hours per person since January 3rd. Probably a little more because sometimes we forget to sign in.

Re: Hours worked
 

To the best of my knowledge, I'm the only one on the team who has consistently logged time.

53 hours from October 20th through January 3rd
102 hours from January 3rd through 17th
155 total hours (9,300 minutes)

No wonder I don't have a life. :)

Disclaimer: I am a team captain and help with graphic design and marketing, really obsess over FRC, and am homeschooled so I can put in extra time on top of meetings. So this is more than the average Wired Wizard. But it's still a lot! And I can not believe it's actually stop build day today. My last year as a student on an FRC team. ;(

Re: Hours worked
 

We started logging hours last year and kept better track of it. This year we have not been so consistent with keeping everything up to date. Last year at least, I had around 350 hours by the end of build season and I assume around the same amount if not more this year.
Do any teams use the hours to motivate students to show up more such as posting "rankings" for everyone to see?

Re: Hours worked
 

This year we installed a clock in/clock out system to track how much time we spend because we've never even had a great estimate in the past. Once we are done with the season, I'll try to remember to post some analysis in here.

Re: Hours worked
 

I log hours volunteered to my company can provide a donation to the team.

Logged approx 175 hours from July-December 2014 running summer workshops, planning training sessions and a preseason build, and running 2x/week training sessions + mock kickoff.

Logged 168 hours from Jan 3 - Feb 13. Will be 40 more hrs Feb 14-17 (208 total). Then at least 2 competitions after that..

So that's approx 400-450 hrs/year

Yep, definitely don't have a life outside of robotics during build season, haha

Re: Hours worked
 

I've been logging my hours for the first time this year, as my new company does verification for the PVSA . Assuming we bag at 9 PM TONIGHT like we plan, I'll have put in 171 hours during the build season. I should easily break 300 hours by the time we hold our end of the year banquet, and probably break 500 hours by the end of the calendar year.

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Our team does track student time at the build site, though I don't keep the records. We have had six sessions of about six hours and about 15 three hour sessions, plus the 13-hour wrap-up session, for a total of 94 "whole team" sessions, which had an average of about 30 students and six mentors. Programming had a couple of six-hour sessions which had about eight students and one or two mentors. I get something like 3000 hours at the build site. Then there's the out-of-shop thinking, research, engineering, planning, buying, prototyping, programming, and scouting. My estimate is therefore 3946 hours.

Re: Hours worked
 

We either need to automate FIRST or automate our jobs more.
Then we can all marvel at the quality of the time spent instead of the quantity. :)

Re: Hours worked
 

One year when I was doing both FRC and VEX I tracked 1200 hours in a single year. The real killer for time was events, show up at 7AM, leave at 10PM, four/five days in a row.

Re: Hours worked
 

So as team captain, I've only missed 1 day during the six week build season.

Now mind you we met 6 days a week. School week meetings runs from 3-8pm, Saturdays are 9-6pm.

Doing the math, I've put in about 198 Hours minus the day I was not present. Factor in the extra hours this last week and I'm over the 210 mark.

Crazy to think how much time is well spent right?!

Re: Hours worked
 

Looking at all of these posts, I didn't know that clocking in and out was a common thing. I kinda like the idea though. I might talk to a programmer about making a system. Sounds like a good offseason project for them.

I have been doing some rough estimations of hourly contributions with a few other people out of curiosity, and this is what I have come up with. I am CAD subteam captain, and I also worked on Build. Because of college classes, my school, day ends at 1:00. I put in at least 300 hours, possibly up to 320 or 330. There are three other people on my team who put in the same amount of time as me (roughly), a few in the 200-250 range, and around 20 at around 100. Five major mentors, putting in around 180 hours each. A few others putting in around 50-70. So that's between around 4820 and 4400 hours from students, and around a thousand mentor hours. A lot. Of time. Fortunately, my schedule this year features little homework, so I am lucky there.

Re: Hours worked
 

Actually, rather like our scouting, real-time data collection is done on paper for reliability, and entered into a spreadsheet a bit later.

Re: Hours worked
 

hmmmm....the students log their hours, but I don't.

4-8:30 for 30 days = 135 hours

9-3 for 6 days = 36 hours

that's only 170 hours. But we'll make up the difference during the competitions, I'm scheduled to go to five in a row

Re: Hours worked
 

My school has required sport credits and two years ago we got recognized. We require 110 hours to get the credit, but by the end of the build season the core group (including myself) easily surpass 200 hours. It is also easily the best 200 hours spent!

Re: Hours worked
 

I got excited last night when my Google spreadsheet that I've been logging robotics hours with told me a beautiful thing: I've spent exactly (to the nearest half hour) 250 hours at robotics during this build season, which averages out to about 41.67 hours per week.

The final weekend was craziest. 15 hours on Saturday, 18.5 on Sunday, and 14 on Monday for a total of 47.5 on those three days alone.

Re: Hours worked
 

My team of 12 students and 9 mentors logged a total of 1109 hours. 7 of those students qualified to attend regionals by getting 50 hours during build season.

My personal total was 180 hours. I am extremely proud of the result of those hours.

Re: Hours worked
 

We're so small now compared to 10+ years ago (roughly 25 students) so we tend to know who's showing up and who isn't there.

We meet 4 days a week to try and not get burned out too quickly. Sometimes it works against us as we end up working 6 to 7 days a week in Weeks 5 and 6 but this year, we did pretty good with our timelines.

Re: Hours worked
 

Just ran the calculations for myself, I'm somewhere around 250 hours in the shop this build season. Taking a day off then its back to driving practice at 30 hours a week until at least week 6.

Re: Hours worked
 

I remember my senior year (which was the 2013 season), me and a few other members passed 500 hours each by week 7 of competition season. We have a time clock where we clock in/out and my exact number was 504 hours.

Re: Hours worked
 

Team 1208 usually logs 6500 hours per season. That includes August to April.

Re: Hours worked
 

I didn't want to, but I added it up.

Between regular build meetings, and then the time outside that planning, finding and ordering parts, helping on various parts/boards etc in the early mornings and evenings after meetings, I've spent about 400 hours.

Since kickoff. Not including my 1.5hrs each day driving there and home.

Re: Hours worked
 

I have spent about 200 hours in our workshop during build season and about another 50 CADing and doing research. That is not including my 30 min of commuting each day and about 3 hours a week running to the store and getting food for the team.

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Total, counting drive... prolly under 60 this season. The whole moving in the middle of build season really helped. Now let's ignore that I'm volunteering at 4 events this season and attending a 5th with the team.

Re: Hours worked
 

We also clock in and out. Each kid ranges from 75 to 120 hours for the whole build season. Our team has somewhere around 25 students on our team so our total is > 1875 and the total is < 3000.

Re: Hours worked
 

This year, the students of team 2175 clocked a total of 4229:48:12 (hhhh:mm:ss) person-hours, or 176 days 5 hours 48 minutes 12 seconds, not including times where they forgot to clock in or out. Many of the people in the shop most often stopped clocking after they hit the lettering requirement of 120 hours, and mentors didn't clock, so the actual amount is actually significantly higher

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Team 1540 collectively spent 3100 hours in the lab in the past six weeks, not including mentors or people forgetting to log in/out. This works out to just under 100 hours/person.

Re: Hours worked
 

If you're serious about potentially budding off into multiple teams, contact David Bodmer, the head mentor for 11. Since starting a "beta team" for freshmen, more kids have had more to do, and a few other teams have followed or modified the model for themselves.

Re: Hours worked
 

I might have missed it in all the replies, but what types of solutions are teams using to record time?

We know from experience that spreadsheets and paper recording has not been effective unless we task someone with it every meeting. This usually deteriorates over time because the kids are not interested in picking up this responsibility.

• Do you use a paper or electronic time clock?
• Do you use a spreadsheet or Google document?
• Do you use a web service?
• Do you use a mobile app?
• Do you use the school's attendance system?
• Do you use something else?

Re: Hours worked
 

I did the math for my hours for these past 7 weeks and got 362.4 hours total just for me.

Re: Hours worked
 

We just use a paper sign in/out sheet. The students quite good with this.

Re: Hours worked
 

We use a computer that has an RFID reader attached to an arduino connected to it. When students enter or leave (the computer is near the door), each student presents a card to the reader and it clocks them in or out. Alternatively, the computer screen has a local website that is always up that they can click on their picture to clock them in or out as well if they forgot their card

Re: Hours worked
 

Our team uses an online sign in/sign out system. Personally I have about 120 hours this season. I don't know how many total hours our team has though. Probably a lot...

Re: Hours worked
 

Between January 3rd, 2015 and February 22nd, 2015, Team 696 which consists of 36 students and six regular mentors has spent over 8,400 people-hours. Our average student attendance over this 7-week period is 202 hours per student with a high of 346 hours and a low of 92 hours, and a median attendance of 195 hours. These are all hours outside of classes during the school day.

Re: Hours worked
 

I'm always amazed that students can put in those kind of hours and not have it seriously impact their school work. Any helpful tips I can give to parents who won't allow that kind of commitment?