NO TEAM Participation.............
 

Hey to everyone out there!


Throughout the summer my team has been fundraising and showing the robot to the public throughout the summer.

(I am pratically the team....SAD to say huh?)

Well I was wondering if any of the 700 teams out there if anyone has any type of team chart that states and keeps track of how many hours each person works in the shop and amount of money each person must raise, in order to travel?

If so please tell me how many hours they must have and how much money the must raise?????????? Or if you have any other suggestions please let me know

Bad Brad

Logging hours:

We used to do that, but then people started going overboard with it. It was supposed to be "document the time you spend at the tech center. If you get there ar 4:00 and leave at 4:55, you can write down that you were there for an hour, it's fine." But people would go from 4:00-6:15 and say they were there for three hours... or they would say, "Well ... I spent ten minutes at home thinking of robot designs... so that counts for an hour of work, right?" And write that down. Bottom line: It just didn't work out.

As far as fund-raising to travel:

In the past everyone has had to pay a set amount to go ($25-50 for a regional, $100-$200 for nationals). It didn't matter how you got the money (parents, fundraising, or from your bank account!) as long as you got it in (and the engineers thought you worked hard enough to go) you could go. However, this year we are tryhing something different. Every student must fundraise 1/2 of the money they will need to go to each event. The other 1/2 of the money can come from fundraising too, or wherever else you can get it from! We'll see how this works out...

- Katie

i know we have a general chart for how long we are in there working so we can total the hours when were done, we might have indivisual hours, but we do keep attendance for every day of who was there

We used to log hours back in 99 before I was around. They had to sign a book when they came in, and then have a teacher/engineer/other adult initial them when they signed out. According to Andy B., it got way too complicated, and in 2000 the teachers got to know the students really well and they knew who has been showing up and who hasnt.

yeah, we log hours. Its not a terrible system, except for the potential "I've got 240 hours hangin out here". Basically, our leaders usually have a core group of 10 or so students who always go and use hours as kind of tiebreakers in the rest. It works. Usually.

We have a time chart. We log our hours and then log what we did those hours. Much if it is BS'd but we all know who doesn't do work. We don't have a fundraising limit since we pay for the trip out of our own pockets and the fundraising just offsets the cost.

Me and 2 other team members (*points at weedie*) all had I think well over 200% of hours :) (Sleeping over 2 or 3 nights will do that :P) I have no idea how many hours that is. The business group just figures out how many hours we have in a meeting and just figure out a percent. I forget what the figure is but it's like 70% or something.

the fundraising we did is broken down to this.


1 - Say 14 people show up to bag @ waldbaums. They all work about 9 hours a piece. alotted time management will allow.
2 - The total amount of money gets divided in half
2a half for the team supplies
2b the other half credits to the trip to FL and such (logging, plane etc)

3 - the half that credits to the team members gets split up according to how many hours the student worked.

that would be how my team split everything up. thankfully we had a very educated coach that knew m.s. excel:D ;)


as for logging team hours in the shop. well we decide that automatically who's the most dedicated. thats how i got to be captain and 2 others became mechanics. only the most dedicated (seen 24 7 even days off/ holidays @ school) will get the top spots everyone else will be painting logos.

Here's how we did it when I worked with the administrative team:
Each student was given an hour sheet, which they were responsable for keeping updated. Whenever they went to a group meeting, students wrote down the hours they worked. They then turn the sheets in at the due dates, and receive credit for the hours they had signed off. This all gets rolled into an elaborate point system that decides who gets to travel...we pick the top 40, which is okay since that's usually about how many people are on our team.

This past year, the team I worked with used a time clock program written by yours truly to log hours spent at our shop. Every team member had an access code which they would enter to punch in or out. It even included a penalty system for those who forgot to punch out. Every adult on the team was given an "administrator" account within the program. It kept constant track of how many administrators were logged in at any given time. When the last administrator/adult logged out, it would by default sign out any students for 1 hour after they signed in. So, even if they had been there all night, if they didn't sign out, they only got one hour of credit. Of course, there was an override option for special cases...

cyberblue implimented a time deal this year with a teacher in charge of it. basically, when you came, you checked in. when you left you checked out. if you didn't talk to him to let him know you were there, tough luck. and if you forgot to tell him when you left something happened but i forget what it was. the team members had to have 80% of the total hours to travel.

Really only around 15-20 people show up on a regular basis on our team...

Those 20 were the one's that got to go to nationals.

Logging and lumberjacks
 

During the construction season we require students to keep a notebook which is checked by the adults, this is where they keep their time. One paragraph of scribbles won't get you 3 or 4 hours, more like 30 minutes. Figure this does a couple of things - teaches them to take notes "good thing later in life" and if it is not written down it never happened or you didn't actually do what you said.. Someone could get credit for working at home but it had to be extensively documented. Working in research that is the way it is, if you do not have your work documented it doesn't count. We try to coach the students on how to take notes for later use.

KY

We just had a big sign in book under a clock people signed in when they got there and signed out when they left weather it was at 8:00PM or 3:00Am the next morning

We don't have any formal sign-in/sign-out procedure, but the adults (both engineers and teacher) keep track of how many meetings everyone attended. I'm not sure how useful that is since most of our "official" meetings are from 4pm-6pm and very little actual robot building gets done during that time. Most of it gets done by the 5-7 of us who stay late (midnight) after most meetings and on our unofficial 36-hour machine shop marathon, which only three of us (myself, another student, and an engineer) made it all the way through. You can do a lot in 36 hours...

Anyway, as far as I can tell, who travels and who doesn't is purely based on the adults' perception of who does work and who doesn't.

hey if you remember rightly wheelman, we also had to pay for comps we went to(i think that os what this is about right??):

25 for the UTC regional
225 for Nationals

Plus we also had to earn enough "points" to stay on the team.
Badjokeguy

this year was 4 nights, and we collected 104+ hours for the one weekend...remember the confusion of signing out at 11:59 pm and signing back in at 12:01 am?

Mmm...Energy drinks. :)

we just have a sign in sheet, if you come to the meeting, you sign the sheet.

our team has a 72 hour min and a 300 dolar min to be able to go to the competition, the hours are fairly firm but the money is a deffinate must! i myself have logged over 200 hours in those 6 weeks but i know people who barely managed to get in 30 and then where suprized when they found out. We are also having some problems with people showing up to help with the spare parts and such, even though its another opertunity for hours.

We have a small enough team (15) that the teacher (and me) can easily keep track of who comes and who doesn't. We have to pretty much pay our own way to the events, since our team doesn't have that kind of money. We had only one case this year of someone not being able to come to our competitions because of lack of participation, though some of us worked a lot harder than everyone else.

We kept time sheets, but it really doesn't mean anything. Everyone who wanted to ended up getting to go to Nationals, so it didn't really matter how much time anyone had.

In 98 and 99 the Technokats had a 50-hour min. I just have to say 72 sounds a little high because the students do have other things to do like sports teams and I barely made the 50 in 1998 because I had wrestling practice every day when everyone else was at the shop.

We always go to two regionals, the local UCF one and one out of state, and we also go to Nationals. The requirements change every year. We each keep track of our hours and turn them in by the month for the first semester. Hours should be singed off by a mentor or other person of reputablitly, they should also be resonable....10 min is not an hour, but if you work for 3 hours and 45 mins 4 hours is acceptable. This year we were going to the Seattle regional and Nationals. To go to Seattle, you needed 60 documented team hours and 5 fundraisors, which were defined as doing anything that brings 50 dollars into the team, or going to/and or particiapation in a set team fundraiser. For nationals you needed to have 90 hours, and 7 FR's.....which seems like alot, but since we start in june its not really....the last week alone i turned in 51 hours, i stopped turning them in when i hit 120.

Sign In Sheet
 

Well, since we only have about 11 members, yes, very small team, we just have a simple sign-in-sheet. This really means nothing...since our Coach tells who can go where. Just about anyone can go to regionals...but when crunch time comes for the championship, if you didn't come, forget it.

Now, to you other teams...how the heck do you even get everyone to keep track of these things? You must be dedicated to these time clock programs. I couldn't keep that up for a week. It's also a bit unfair, but I guess that you have to do something like that, if you have a large team, and low funding.

oh i know, 72 hours realy isnt that bad though, however there where some people who had to work and had practice and such, those are reasonable excuses but what peeves me is the ones who cant get it in becuase they are too busy playing video games, not to mention when they are there they dont do ANYTHING!

Last year, our team used a time-clock and it was not used much. Nor did we find a good use for the data. The rationale was: Wanna complain about why something looks like it does? Or wanna complain why something was built or designed that way? Let's go look at your time card... Oh you have only showed up 5 times... Tough Luck. -- The result: The dedicated came and others stayed home.

This year, I have designed an Access database that tracks data on every team member: name, address, e-mail, parents, school advisor, parking spot # etc. I also added in a table for fundraising and attendance during the summer and the fall.

At the beginning of the year, each member must sign and have their parents sign an agreement that states they will abide by the team bylaws which include a fundraising clause.

New Members must raise $50. Returning Members $100. Team Student Leadership must raise $150. These are all minimums. We do not care how people bring in the money, whether it is talking with family, friends, etc. working on a team fundraiser where the total team hours is divided by the income, or the money might come from another source.

The fundraisng division works with local comapnies and granting organizations to come up with most of the money.

my team has logged ours for a while. We don't work as often as many teams, but myself i've put in roughly abotu 115 horus in the 6 weeks. And that doesn't count all the work i've put in on it during classes, but each team is different so go figure.

This year, we had a log book, and a parent would sign students in and out as students arrived and left.

To be on the team, you had to have at least 60% of official hours, and to go to any competitions, you had to have 80% of official hours.

I think "official hours" was somewhere in the 100-150 range. Figure 3 hours on most weeknights, 8 on Saturdays, and 4 on Sundays for 6 weeks.

You could also get approval to write in any extra hours for work you did outside official hours.

Of course, the real performers put in well over 100% of "official" team hours, especially the last 2 weeks.

Last year, students kept track of their own hours, but that didn't work as well. I also kept track of my hours last year, even though I am not a student, and I put in well over 200 hours. This year, I started a new job, with long hours, so I didn't come close to that, but I was probably not far from 100% considering I also took care of some team stuff off-hours.

to further explain what Pierson said

As far as the regionals go, once you have earned your money bought your shirt and arranged to stay in Seattle with the group if you wish to you are basically going to regional. This system works because we only go to one regional and it is only a hour to an hour and a half drive for parents (some students have been known to get there a bit faster...but that's another story). Just because you come to the regionals doesn't mean you get a job at the regionals however and most of the time as it turns out people who don't have a job there just don't come. With a team of only about 30 students signed up and 12 who usually come it isn't a very large issue.

Nationals...the last time we went to nationals was two years before I joined. Sorry I don't know how it was done but since we still have one mentor from that time I'll ask him tomorrow at our meeting for you and see if he remembers.