Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

Maybe compete in other competitions as well so that everyone can build and drive a robot, ie FTC or VEX.


Its a robotics team, no different from a sports team. If you miss practice you sit on the bench. No one signs up for Volleyball and Cross-country at the same time (assuming they're in the same season), so the same should be with robotics (assume robotics is a winter sport with a winter season).

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

This.
Robotics should be treated as a winter sport with some stuff during the spring summer and fall. When students come up to me apologizing for not going saying they were too busy with swimming. I tell them if they want to gain responsibility they have to choose. Some do some don't. This year I want to have a parents meeting early on where we explain to the parents the time commitment that way they know their kid can't sign up for a sport in the winter.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

First off, why are the 2014 game pieces out and available? All game pieces from previous years should be stuck in a closet and locked up, unless being used for build/demo. If you give a kid a toy, he'll play with it.

Second, it sounds like you need a little more structure.

We have a parent meeting at the start of the fall that sets out expectations for students, especially time commitments. We set out requirements for lettering, which makes our expectations pretty clear. We tell them this is just like a sport, and should be treated as such with attendance and focus.

We have a structure to help them find what they want to do. Our summer camp is very structured, and gives everyone exposure to each part of the team - just like kids first learning t-ball, you have to play every spot of the field once to figure out what you like and what your good at. Our fall program generally assumes students know where they want to go, but we still allow some moving around - spend a few weeks in one subteam, and if you don't like it go spend a few weeks in another. We have specific projects designed around the number of students, with fixed deadlines - there's not really time to goof around, just like a soccer team doesn't spend hours goofing off.. When we find our team is more energetic, we toss in team building activities - things that take may be 15 minutes at the start of the meeting, but let them burn off some of that energy.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

I sympathize with this, but I can't really agree with it. Our team safety rules -- and, one would hope, our team safety culture -- make tools off limits to students until they have been trained in using them properly. No building will happen before safety has been fully addressed.

There are no shop rules preventing people from driving robots, though.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

I have to agree with this. However, there are different ways to approach safety that can be more or less fun. One year, we went a little overboard... watched videos on safe shop usage, had a rather long written test. It was a very boring meeting all around, with bad feedback from the students. So, now we do more of an individual hands-on approach. Basically, students are told they aren't allowed to touch a tool until they've had a primer on it from a mentor, then we start working on something. It means I might have to explain proper use and safety features of the bandsaw 5 times that first night, but the students get a better experience, have a little more fun, and get used to coming to us mentors when they need something! It also conditions us mentors to always ask "have you used this tool before?" when we're helping a student - the answer then lets us go into safety features more in depth when needed!

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

As far as people leaving because they think they won't get to be on the field until they're juniors, I think you really have to put more emphasis on the fact that FIRST really is more than robots. We have a slight problem with this too, as the way our team functions, robot build is usually separated from everyone else and they stop appreciating each other's role as much as they should. Probably only about a third of our team is especially mechanically inclined. I think the important thing to make sure that everyone on the team remembers is that if it wasn't important, the team wouldn't be doing it, so everyone from business to driving to build is actually important to the team. As far as the immaturity and attendance issues, that's not really a problem that we have very frequently, so I don't know how to help you there. Our freshmen generally tend to be fairly respectful of the more experienced students.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

My short answer would be to get everybody involved as soon as possible. Find activities that can relate to the students interests, such as writing pseudo code for a simple game and then have them actually act out the code. For some new students they ask "What can this club do for me?" in their minds. If they don't see a benefit for it they will walk away before build season. Just keep in mind that things are good in moderation and not burn everybody, including yourself, out with activities.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

My words of advice (from a 3 yr old team).... Start EARLY....The earlier the better.

Last year we decided to go visit the 8th graders at their school in May (before they come to the high school). We introduce them to our team and invite them to a "information night" for them and their parents. It is only open for incoming 9th graders and gave them the opportunity to understand our program.

During this info night we invite them to join us in our off season events in the summer. (We do local street fair events, some fun fund raisers, and other social events). The incoming 8th graders that participate end up feeling like they are part of the team and form new friendships before they even start high school. This approach worked very well for us last year and is looking good for this year.
We have been meeting twice a week for the month of may, building a R2D2 Photon Shooting robot to use at our street fair event. The primary build team is "hands off" and the underclassman are building this demo robot.

Something interesting happened this year with this approach. (only the 2nd year we have done this). We had some 8th graders ask if they could come to our May meetings as they were really excited to join our team. We now have three 8th graders that have joined us and have learned alot about FRC and other teams. Lots of smiles and laughing with students they didn't know 3 weeks ago is what it takes to make them feel welcome. Once they feel welcome, they will stick around.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

One thing to come to terms with is that in FRC, student attrition rates will likely always be high. FRC is a massive commitment of time and effort, and many more students are inevitably willing to show up for a few meetings because it sounds interesting than to gut it out and really invest as much of themselves as is necessary to be a productive team member.

With this in mind, here are some things I've observed that are useful for maximizing student retention:

1. Pre-season activities must be fun and engaging. It is a rare student who is willing to sit through a bunch of extracurricular lectures for the promise of eventually doing something fun during build season. In fact, here's a curious thing: when I joined 449, I did not know until a month or so before build season started that there was an "actual competition." The pre-season that year consisted of the team hosting their own little internal vex competition, and there was no talk of build season until it was almost over. Strange as it may sound, this was a pretty good strategy - new students were immediately able to involve themselves in actual projects, to try their own ideas and see those ideas succeed or fail. This was far more valuable than any FRC-specific technical knowledge we could have gained during those same months.

2. Build an inviting team culture. There are few things that drive new students away faster than feeling excluded. You must put conscious effort into avoiding a culture that establishes in-groups. FRC has a massive barrier-to-entry for a prospective student as it is; the last thing you need is to augment those with social barriers.

3. Make sure new students know that it's alright not to know something. I've seen far too many freshman robotics students bumble away cluelessly at a task they've been given that they have no real idea how to complete, simply because they're too proud/embarrassed to ask for help. This is one of the hardest things to dispel, as a mentor, and one of the most important - most new students cannot succeed in this way, and a student who is not succeeding is not a student who is likely to stay.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

I'd say develop culture of relationships, build a team that has fun together, not just a "group of people where part of the group does what rest of the group wants to do"
Everybody in search of place where they can belong. If you provide such a place and kids see it, then it doesn't matter what exactly they do on the team - they'll stay.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

If you think you have gotten enough answers about the general topic of retaining new members, I'm curious why you think your group is going through an every-two-years boom/bust cycle.

Can that be shared, or does it need to stay private?

Blake

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

Ah, that's a fun one. Our team currently consists of about 15 seniors, 2 juniors, 15 sophomores, and 2 freshmen. Last year we had about 10 members graduate (most of whom joined after their freshman year) and the year before that, there were no members of the graduating class on our team. The current junior class is a rather sensitive story to a lot of our team, but this year a lot of our freshmen just seemed uninterested or committed to other sports.

It's not exactly a cycle, but it really feels like it to a lot of our team.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

Our situation is a the same, but its every 4 years instead of two. The senior class that graduated last year were the main players in the team throughout their 4 seasons, then the freshman class of last year (we are sophmores this year) are the main players right now, and will be for the next 2 years most likely. I just have no way of explaining this :|

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

One of the things we've done that seems to help keep rookie retention is to increase the number of hours that we meet during autumn. Now that we meet two evenings during the week and alternate Saturdays from tryouts until Christmas break, we lose far fewer during the build season when we meet three evenings and every Saturday.

We have had trouble keeping seniors in recent years. Of our five juniors in 2016, I expect that we'll only have one or two -- losing our three three-year veterans (including my own son and daughter) for 2017. Many of these losses are due to desire to participate in the Senior Play (a dramatic presentation), a few are to job opportunities, and a few are to simple burnout. The intensity of the junior research project and senior research project at Slidell High certainly does not help. In our case, we may have to make some changes to let our veterans continue to contribute to the near-peer mentoring at a lesser time commitment in order to keep them at all.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

Agreed. It would be easier to offer assistance if we knew some of the reasons for this boom and bust cycle.

4607 has been graduating 10-13 members each year for our short four year existence - and every year we bring in a load of 10th and 11th grade students that have an immediate impact. Next year we will be returning 16 seniors - and all but two have at least 2 years on the team. However, we noticed that the 9th grade students were not ready to take on the tasks and the time constraints required by our FRC season - and a lot of this is due to their maturity and lack of a drivers license.

My suggestion is to create a FTC team that is designated for freshman. We did this in 2015/16 and most of these students are wanting to return to their FTC team in the fall and then transition into our FRC team after their season ends. This has created a need for a new FTC team in our HS to bring in the new 9th grade class. The sophomores on the FTC team will not have to pay a new registration fee for FRC 4607 as the two fees are the same - so that has helped to encourage them to stay on FTC and then transition more slowly into the FRC season.