Re: Team Structure Help
 

1). Absolutely. The $200 Team Dues are what cements your spot on the TIMS roster. This year, we had 109 families pay the dues. Eligibility for travel depends on your time contribution and the work you do.

2) Yes, the parents pay their $50 or contribution to our events. It's a non-negotiable. If your families have not contributed, you don't get to travel with the team.

3) Our mentor hierarchy is not entirely flat - we're actually revamping that section now, there's definitely mentors who have 'authority' over a particular segment of the team, (not to mention our advisor) but we certainly all work together.

I'll be posting our 2015-16 soon(ish)!

Re: Team Structure Help
 

Mentor hierarchy is a rather interesting topic, and I've seen it done many ways. Ours is mostly flat, but every mentor has their own niche where they fit in. For example, I "lead" the electrical team, but help out in every other area. That means I'm responsible for training and ensuring the electrical team has appropriate student leadership and direction. If I'm not there, someone else can step in, but I plan my absences ahead of time, and make sure either the student leader or another mentor knows my thoughts about anticipated issues. The same is true for our mechanical and programming leads, and I assume our business mentors (although I don't work too closely with that part of the team, just jump in when asked for a specific task)- it's all about communication.

Perhaps the key aspect, for my team, is that the students make all the decisions (except where Safety or School rules get involved!). So if we're working on a design for a subsystem and two mentors have different thoughts for the direction, it doesn't matter. The students brainstorm first, the mentors then can provide input (which, in some cases, means redirecting the conversation and design down a different path), and the students make the decision. So, when two mentors present different ideas, neither one can over rule the other - the students decide and we move on.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

Thanks for the post Libby! I've been doing a lot of reading lately into other team's manuals and organizations, and it's great to see how other teams operate.

The team I'm currently mentoring has similar policies for an application fee (I think it is also right around $200) as well as a requirement that parents help provide food during build season. During build season the parents rotate being responsible for bringing dinner for the team, whether it's take out pizza or home cooked meals. It was actually really nice to have so many meals reflecting the cultural backgrounds of the students -- we had butter chicken, schnitzel, chow mein noodles, pasta with meatballs -- I looked forward to dinner as much as I did building the robot ;)

As Libby implied, asking for a fee helps legitimize the application. People tend to be a bit more selective and put more effort and care into things when some of their hard-earned cash is involved.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

Thats a good point. Another point another student just brought up to me was people fundraising for the $200 if they had trouble paying for it. We have lightbulbs and hype wipes ready to go!

Re: Team Structure Help
 

Yes, and having to fundraise their own entry fee will also indicate to you that a student is motivated to be on the team.

It's not unreasonable either. Think about how much you pay to be part of any other sports team. Here in Canada, hockey is really big. Kids (or their parents) pay all kinds of money for equipment, fees, and then the parents get involved driving to and from practices, games, tournaments, etc.

An FRC team is a sports team.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

I wanted to suggest to have a members fee as well. That will weed out free loaders. However to have a system where if kid is from poor family but shows dedication, then fee is waved.
To put things into perspective, our team fee was $600.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

That's exactly what we do! If parents don't have time to be a part of the meal rotation (or bringing water/drinks to the build site), then that's where the $50 contribution comes in. It's a 'would you rather' situation for our parents. Bring us some food, or bring us the money and we'll feed ourselves - whatever works. :)

Yep! That's a thing on our end too - we definitely make sure that if a student wants to be on the team and can't make the dues, their fundraising efforts would contribute directly towards their own dues.

We do this for travel/event fees too - fundraising cuts your payments.

This is a better descriptor of how we work, too. There's definitely a mentor who 'leads' each subgroup, and our advisor who takes care of all the paperwork/financials, but other than that, we all jump in and help each other.

The nice thing about having a mentor who 'leads' is that they're essentially paired up with the student leaders of that group or subteam - students drive the decisions, mentors help make it happen.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

Good idea about waiving fees for deserving kids.

What does $600 buy you? Do you fundraise part/most of the travel expenses or are students responsible for that too?

Students on my current team paid ~$200 for the team application but then had to pay around $400 per regional competition we went to, and our trip to St. Louis was another $850. These figures were subsidized as much as possible by fundraising and sponsorship.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

The first thing to do here is to talk to your lead mentor about these problems and suggest that you would like to help fix them.

The next step is to establish a leadership tree with clearly defined responsibilities for each group. I understand that you want to be democratic and fair, but elections do not always pick the best person for each role. Don't put your team in hole by allowing someone who won't commit enough time to the role to be elected into the position. Often, a leadership structure is agreed upon by the leadership themselves instead of by the entire team. Strong leaders will fix most if not all of these problems.

A 5 page write up including expectations and responsibilities for each position (including non-leadership positions) can alleviate a lot of these problems. Many teams have posted their "team manual" to CD for reference.

Another tip from me is to require people to log their hours and require that they meet a certain threshold to travel with the team.

Good luck!

-Jeff

Re: Team Structure Help
 

I think school put out $10,000 for the team. We had only 9 kids, so that brought budget to $15,400. That included few "extra" parts, travel and accommodation.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

In your situation, it may not make sense to have a flat hiearchy for mentors. I have been on a team where there was a clear lead mentor, one other "every-day" mentor and a plethora of mentors and parents who think they are helping (once a week or less).

In this situation, I think a lead mentor with more power is a good choice. The lead mentor is going to understand the problems and situations that the team is struggling with more than those less dedicated. To be fair, the mentor should clearly tell the other mentors when they decide to link up what the objective of the team is and what their role on the team is going to be.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

I think there needs to be a balance between democratic discussion/vote and "the buck stops here". You do need some element of both. There needs to be a person who says "OK, I'm making a decision, THIS is what we will do" but they should speak after everyone who wants to have input has had their say. You can't wait forever for those people, either, so other mentors and students need to know that if they want to be a part of the discussion, they need to participate or it will get made without them.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

Our team often starts meetings after the last class, We serve food later in the evening, around 7:30 so it is typically those who have been working who are still around.

Don't worry about those who just sign up to put the membership on their college (or job application). If there is an interview, it will come out that they didn't really do anything. The mother of a friend on another team interviewed a job applicant who could not remember the team's name and could not say what role he served on the team. Needless to say, he did not get the job.

You may want to ask your mentor what allowing everyone into the pits, at the same time has to do with being inclusive. What would happen when your team grows to 50 members or 100 members? Perhaps some of the adults who volunteer as the Safety Judges(?) at the various events can nicely inform the mentor that there is an unsafe number of people in the pit.

What's a good # of safe people in the pit. With and w/o the bot.

Our drive team consists of 4 people
All of which are
2 - cad
1 - safety manager
1 - shop manager
4 - build team
1 - electrical
1 - strategy.

So with just the 4 people most bases are covered except for programming and scouting.

Pit crowding
 

One of the best ways to discourage large congregations at the pit is by giving everyone a job at competition - whether it's cheering, scouting, taking photographs, promoting spirit, field reset, running an FLL table, or passing out safety or spirit paraphernalia. Mentors too! We had a policy that there was supposed to be EXACTLY ONE of the six main technical mentors on duty at the pit at all times as well as the three "on duty" members of the pit crew, and occasional visits by the drive team, scouts, or people solving a specific repair/maintenance problem. Since the on duty mentor didn't have much to do, and our pit was on an "outside corner" where there was plenty of room to stay near the pit but be out of traffic, mentors did do some long (10+ minute) chatty turnovers, but these steps cut down significantly on the crowding from our previous years. Except for those mentioned above, our team members were expected to spend no more time in our pit than they did in each of the other pits, learning about the other machines.

The time it really didn't help at all this year was when we were selected for the first time for Bayou playoffs and everyone wanted to stick around after the big parade back to the pit! Even so, after about 15 minutes or so, most had returned to the stands. And yes, there was another party after our alliance won Bayou, but by then most of the other pits were packed into trailers and there was plenty of room to gather around for a while. But once we got serious about reconfiguring our robot to fit in a shipping crate, team members that couldn't find something useful to do on our robot found other things to do (such as helping break down the fields and stack game pieces for the trip to the next regional).