Preventing freshman flight?
 

How do you guys prevent freshman from quitting right at the beginning of build season when meeting frequency increases, and how do you continue to benefit members who cannot meet every day of build season? Also how do you schedule build season to still build the robot and prevent member burnout? If you don't do this, how do you manage a culture of attendance where members come to meetings and multitask? Do you divide the days that different sub-teams meet to increase focus (loud sub-teams on Mondays, quiet sub-teams on Thursdays?) Do you have an attendance requirement for lettering, or an accomplishment requirement? What has and hasn't worked for robotics scheduling during build season? What secrets do you have for keeping on deadline?

Re: Preventing freshman flight?
 

In order to retain freshmen, last year Team 1257 did a bunch of small "engineering challenges" with our new members. Simple tasks like trying to build the tallest possible structure with a certain number of toothpicks and gumdrops, or trying to support as many textbooks as possible with a single sheet of printer paper and some tape. The challenges were fun and engaging, also helping new members learn about engineering, problem solving, and teamwork.

Re: Preventing freshman flight?
 

Wow, there's a lot to unpack here. Now, I don't have all the answers to your questions, but I'll try to help as much as I can. Hopefully some of this will be useful to you.

You can't. Some people will inevitably need to leave. Life happens. That being said, you can minimize this by having clear expectations set out at the beginning of the year-- to attend competitions means X hours of work during build season, to be on the build team means X hours of work during the off season, etc. Clear expectations and creating an investment in the team are your best ways of keeping people around-- and these can work together. We naturally put value on things we invest time in. Getting people involved with a variety of interesting things from the get go can help with this.

In reference to your second part, most teams don't meet every day of the build season. If that's the expectation of all your members, I can see why burn out might be an issue. That much time isn't just an investment, it's a sacrifice.

My teams have had a couple approaches to this. My senior year in 2220 was one method of this: extend the build season. Build two robots and plan to iterate all the way through championships. Combine that with hard deadlines and goals-- moving drive train by week 2, a feature-complete robot week 5, etc, and that was 2220's best robot ever.

Option two (what 2667 did this year) was to consciously (or rather, unconsciously) keep things very simple. Building a simple robot in 6 weeks is much easier than building 2826's Depthcharge in 6 weeks.

Another part of this is being very cognizant of what your skills are. If it's going to take your CAD girl six weeks to figure out how to do an elevator, that might not be your best bet. The more quickly you can design and iterate the better off you'll be. If your team has a "signature" drive train, I'd suggest practicing designing one to specs very quickly. But I digress. The important parts here are either extending your time, decreasing your complexity, or increasing your speed. It's the golden triangle.

It comes back to investment. If people want to be there and feel like their time is being used well, they'll be there. If they feel like there isn't anything to do, or they're wasting their time, they won't be.

Some teams keep task lists-- when you don't have anything to do, you take something from the list and start working on it. I haven't tried this yet, but it sounds like it might be a good idea for keeping people aware of what tasks are left to do.

For my teams it's always been more a question time/work left to do. And our senior year we had up to 150 people meeting in the shop at once, so things got crowded. If it works for you though, I don't see why you wouldn't try it.

Yup. It's very important to make sure these requirements are very specific and clearly communicated. We had a situation this year that we were able to defuse easily due to our clearly spelled out policy.

This is something wholly dependent on your situation-- what your mentors' schedules look like, what your students' schedules look like, what your relationship with your school is. It's all highly conditional.

There is no magic bullet. There might be a team that runs completely on schedule, but I haven't heard of one. Something always goes wrong. It takes an entire team of effort to keep anywhere close to schedule.

Re: Preventing freshman flight?
 

As was already mentioned scheduling depends alot on what the schedule of mentors and members looks like however one thing that has always worked for my team is that we have someone at the shop every night during build season and others come what ever nights they can make it. This enables many members to work around their jobs and school activities.
Years that we are large enough that our budget cannot support every one going on the trip we do lay out hours and behavioral requirements to go on the trip. Usually anyone who still shows regularly at the end of the school year gets a letter.
I think a large part of our members not getting burt out is getting something to start testing fast because then we can play with it and our method of meeting, come when it is most convenient for you.

Re: Preventing freshman flight?
 

Without trying to address each question individually, the general theme here is attendance - how do you get people to show up?

It's important to figure out why people stop showing up - maybe they got burned out, or maybe they're involved with another winter activity that conflicts, or maybe they have a problem getting a ride to the meetings, or maybe they don't think they can handle their homework alongside meetings every day. Whatever it is, you can only address the problem after you know the reason.

In general, though...

Try increasing teambuilding and "fun" activities that aren't as serious or stressful as building the robot. The more the team feels like a close-knit family, the less likely people are going to want to leave. The more people Associate robotics meetings with "fun", the less likely they are to leave. For example, our fall meetings all have a 30 minute "snack time" in the middle - it's a chance to unwind, socialize, and gobble down some cookies or chips. At the start of each fall meeting we do some sort of team building exercise that has nothing to do with the robot - not only does it help everyone get to know each other, but it can often help to absorb some of the chatty energy that can distract people after a long School day.

Look at travel to/from meetings, and try to organize both a carpool system and a homework club. I know students on our team have carpooled every year, especially when we were building away from the school. Now that we're at the school, there's a fairly large group that sticks around after school and helps each other with their homework before the meetings start (and once mentors can get there, they have another resource for help if they're stuck on something!). The homework part can especially help - many parents would have a problem with their kid getting home late every evening saying "i spent the afternoon playing with robots, now I need to stay up late and do all my homework!" - it's much better if they can get home with all the homework done and relax a bit with the family, parents will like that a lot more!

Foster an atmosphere of acceptance- make sure everyone is included equally at the meetings, regardless if they show up once a week or every night. Even if people can't be there every meeting, you want them to feel welcome, useful, and part of the team. Sure, you'll have a small core that never missed a meeting, but those people are the ones who hold it together and enable everyone else to miss a few here or there. Plus, this is about inspiration, and you might just inspire that kid who shows up once a week by including him, and you might discourage him if you can't find anything worthwhile or fun for him to do when he does show up.

Finally, we do include incentives in our lettering requirements. Straight off the bat, there's a requirement for attendance- if you want to letter, you need to be at 80% of all the initially scheduled meetings for the build season (if we add meetings to the end of the season because we're behind, they are not considered "required"). We also ask each student to put together a small portfolio showing what they accomplished for the year and how they grew within the program (we stress that they shouldn't sped a lot of time on it - we aren't looking for something sparkly and pretty, just a record of what they did so we can be sure they didn't just sit around chatting).

Re: Preventing freshman flight?
 

I think I have something meaningful to add for once.
Our team is not too worried about people who aren't always there. We have about 30+ students on the team, only about 15 of whom are hardcore, and show up all of the time. That's okay to us.
How we cope is through management. As captain last year, pretty much my sole job was making sure everybody else was able to work productively. Sometimes, it was as simple as finding them a tape measure. Mostly, it was pointing them in the right general direction, and occasionally, I had to walk some of them through everything.
It is not an ideal system. I think we have many students that don't believe they can do the task they are given, and are so afraid of failing that they forget to start. We have tried having mock build seasons in the fall, and our lesson system is posted on here. These have helped a bit, but the problem still remains.
This year, we are trying something new: FTC. We are hoping that less intimidating robots and a longer build season, plus veteran team members helping to teach rookies, will be enough to raise our average skill level.
It may not work. That's a scary thought, but it is okay. What is important is that we are trying something. Maybe the solution is not FTC, but Lego League in the junior high. Maybe we should go back to our lesson system. If we keep trying, we can figure it out.

TL;DR: Not all students need to be hardcore. Having some who manage the non-hardcore students helps a ton. Try stuff (like FTC) until something works for your team.

Re: Preventing freshman flight?
 

Nick is right - you'll never get it down to zero, and not only for the freshmen. We always lose some seniors to senior play (invariably the same weekend as Bayou), and others to changing family or work requirements. We have managed to reduce the attrition rate by communicating expectations early, not only to the students, but to their parents (we did two parent meetings in the past week). Additionally, we now hold "tryouts", which takes place three nights a week for two weeks (a bit longer last year), on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday (the same days as our early build season schedule). If people can't make those, they probably won't make build season. We test for both attitude and aptitude, and mostly select on attitude, filtering out whiners, distractors, and those who just don't really seem interested in trying new things. We use aptitude scoring as well as team member input and our needs to determine who will end up doing what.

Our first four years, we started build season at three nights a week and built to four, five, or (rarely) six as the season progressed. This was because we were meeting in a classroom, so our head coach really had to be there nearly every session. We did find that having a "programming night" each week (3-6) with maybe one build team member and two controls/wiring members as well as all or nearly all of the programmers really worked well. There were also occasional build-only sessions, and maybe one or two controls-only sessions. On the whole, however, we find that we really want to have at least a representative of each discipline at every meeting, to help keep each group up to date. This year, our robot build will be in an out-bulding (affectionately known as "the shed: the middle of the five small buildings here"†) and we're planning to have cross-functional project teams, which should make "partial team" meetings even more feasible.

We have never required every member (or mentor) to attend every hour of every build session, but we definitely have a minimum number of expected hours per week to qualify/maintain status as junior varsity, varsity, and officer/team leader*. The big difference between JV and varsity is that JV doesn't get the field trip to to Bayou Regional on Thursday or Friday. We did bring our two top JV fund-raisers to CMP last year.

When thinking about burnout, also consider the coaches and mentors. For some of them, their regular two-week vacation from work may also cover burnout, for others, a bit more time may be in order.

Lettering - we require students to meet at least 3 of four requrements to letter:
Being a member

• of the varsity team at the end of build season (this usually means that you have become "essential" to the team as well as meeting the hourly goals)
• Fund-raising. The dollar value changes year to year. We also recognize major fund-raising efforts, whether or not they result in the expected dollar figure.
• Community Service Hours. We include CS hours arranged through the team fully, and outside CS hours (e.g. soup kitchens, church mission trips, Katrina rebuilds - yes, they're still going on) at 1:2.
• Being active (actively participating, not just a nominal member) on a committee/business function such as web design, media, history project, sponsor renewal, grants, spirit.

* - While we've never set explicit numbers, the same is true for "watch mentors". We want to have one mentor "on watch" in or near the pit throughout our active pit hours, but the eligible candidates are selected based mostly on their commitment level. The goal (met this year) is that the student pit captain can handle everything and the watch mentor is only there as backup should things turn truly sideways. Oh, wait - the pit captain had to leave for about three minutes Friday afternoon to handle a situation and left me "in charge". Nothing untoward came up in those few minutes.

† - be it ever so humble, there's no place like home, eh?

Re: Preventing freshman flight?
 

A lot of burnout and/or intimidation can be avoided if your team is large enough. We tell kids that they should try to schedule one or two weekdays each week and then Saturday if possible. This means that each component team needs to keep its activities updated (we have a job board for this) so that the students and mentors present on any given day know what needs to be done. We generally have two after school and two evening meetings per week, plus Saturdays. Most of our mentors can't make it to all of the weekday meetings, so the component teams divide up into subteams with a mentor and a student leader. Those students leaders and mentors have to make sure their projects stay on track.

That said, we tend to have more than a few kids who come almost every day.

Re: Preventing freshman flight?
 

We are a smaller team (25 students) from a more rural community and this is generally how we operate:

1) We often times rotate freshmen (or just new members in general) around to different groups while seeing what interests them before they pick a sub-team to work with at a higher frequency. We've found allowing them to test everything out in the more intense environment that is created with build season helps them figure out what they have time to do and what interests them.

2) We schedule meetings for Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday each week but we work with the schedules of every student and will adjust meetings based on what needs to be done. Weekdays are 6 to 9 with Monday being required and Saturday is from 10-4 and is required as we do design reviews and have time to really dissect what we'd accomplished in a week.

3) We require at least 85% to 90% attendance for two straight years to get a letter and students can get honor cords if they are a 4 year active team member, specifically for Freshman through Senior year.

4) We've found that basketball and Robotics don't work well, but apart from that it's generally easy to work around other people's schedules.

5) We use design reviews to evaluate where we are compared to where we need to be in order to get through build, programming, and debug before we bag. They take place on Saturdays from 10 to 12 and we figure out from there what we have to do for the next week.

Re: Preventing freshman flight?
 

We drill it into everyone's heads that they don't have to come to every meeting. We stress that you come whenever you want, however much you want. You can come once every two weeks, or you can sell your soul to the team and come every day.

Re: Preventing freshman flight?
 

Interesting to try to pull all this together:

As usual with FRC, no two teams do it exactly the same way, and many teams make adjustments every year. You have to find what works for you. Though personally, I feel that a student who doesn't make it a whole lot more than "once every two weeks" isn't going to get much out of the program, nor contribute much to the team. During build season, if you aren't putting in at least six hours a week of build, you aren't really getting the FRC experience. If you aren't putting in additional hours outside the build time (strategy, design, research, scouting), you're not getting the full FRC experience.

Re: Preventing freshman flight?
 

The way I would phrase it is:

You do not have to attend every meeting, or every minute of every meeting. The following meeting times are mandatory to remain a member: [insert your own times here, if any--if not, omit this sentence]. But, I remind you, you get out of this program what you put into it.