How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

Our team has been going through this weird cycle for a few years where every other class has ~15 members on the team, and the other classes will have about 2 members on the team. It's not that we can't attract people, it's that a lot of them will leave after the first few weeks for one reason or another. For example, we started this year with about 20 freshmen and now we are down to 2, 1 of which who has been committed to the team since he started 8th grade. We think we have an idea of what's causing the cycle of no members and tons of members, but we'd like to know what other team do that successfully get their new members to stay. Our usual fall activities include a few offseason events, trying to teach them how to do things that contribute to the team, and planning fun things for the whole team to do, but this year there were a few less fun things to do and all of the freshmen just stopped showing up. Is there anything else we could be doing to get new members to stay on the team?

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

If this were happening on my team, I'd sit down with students and make a list of things that THEY want to do. Then assign them each aspects of the various activities.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

The short version is you have to give them a reason to stay.

It's a really complex problem with no answer that's going to guarantee you 100% retention, but here are some places to start:

• Kids have to feel like they can do this. If there isn't enough help and they're expected to jump in on their own, they'll feel lost / incapable and move on. This is where quality mentorship really matters.
• Kids won't want to stay if they feel like they have to "wait their turn" to get involved. Telling new students they get to do the cool stuff only after a few years on the team is a very quick way to make your team very small. Maybe the freshmen won't have the same jobs or responsibilities as a senior, but they should be doing something of value.
• Whatever they are doing, they have to feel like what they did influenced the trajectory of the robot and really mattered in the season. Prototyping is a great way to give kids a sense of ownership of the robot ("my intake made it on the robot!!!") while retaining a strong sense of design direction from leadership.
• In general, kids need mentoring, either from older kids or from adults. Only the most driven and motivated kids will force themselves into their area of interest and demand to learn everything they need right away. Teach kids everything you can before the season so they can contribute during the regular season.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

Chris is Me has it right - people are less likely to leave if they get heavily involved doing something they like. And with robotics, that means strong mentorship that constantly pulls people up.

This past year, my team changed its lettering requirements to include a "lettering project" - basically, something that benefits the team that the student can take ownership of. For example, one student was responsible for the CAW - she spent 5 minutes on it every meeting, and it built out alongside the robot, instead of our usual last minute scramble. She was a freshman, learning as she went (a mentor had to help her understand what everything was, where we purchase stuff from, etc), and it was a great learning tool for her. Another student, a senior this time, wrote an entire scouting system, utilizing the FRC Event API to get data on each match from the FMS. More technical, more nuanced than making the CAW... But that's what the projects let us do - each student can shape their project to their interests and skills, and the difficulty and complexity of the projects grows along with the student. It gives them a lot of buy-in to the team, as they can poi t to it and say "i did that!". And after a few years, the projects will hopefully start to provide the students with a small portfolio they can use for things like college applications/interviews or when applying for internships.. Students pick their own projects, either from a list of things we know we need, or by coming up with something themselves. They have an "assigned mentor" to work with on that project so they always know who to go to for help. We had something like 2/3 of the team complete projects.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

This is not something my team has mastered but we have improved.

We realized we needed more members this year as we were becoming increasingly small.

We had about 50 members show up to our first day. 10 of them previous members. The first day we did a keynote style run down of what we do. The second day we kicked it off with quick training on basic hand tools and power tools. We had about 35 people come to that. We then kicked off our offseason project involving building a brand new robot and competing with it at an offseason. Throughout that sub season we had about 20 people there. By the season I would say we had about 25 people on our team.

My biggest reccomendation is that you have one person accurately delegating responsibilities. Members leave when they get bored and get bored when they don't have something to do.

Also make sure people are trained early so they know what they are doing and don't feel behind everyone.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

This is a big one. Often new students are used to a LOT of structure. School, athletic teams, bands, etc. all have highly structured meetings and events. If there isn't structure to your delegation, new students may get the feeling that the team isn't going anywhere or that they aren't "getting to do anything".

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

I think one of the main problems we have with getting new members actively involved is that while we make an effort to teach them how to do things, they often don't get an offseason project to apply their new skills to. Then a lot of them don't retain the knowledge, or in some cases there will be a project for them to practice with but it's only one project and not a lot of people can work on it, so the rest just leave.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

I really agree with all the points made, and wanted to add to Sam's post regarding our team.

I think most teams have the issue of having a lot of people initially joining and then many people leaving after the first few weeks. Some people leaving is just natural, as they are trying out some things that they don't know if they will like, and later realize that they don't like it too much. However this year we have had more dedicated members than ever before and I think we can attribute it to a few factors:

1.) Things to do - As obvious as this may seem, we didn't really implement it much prior to this year. People would come into the lab - and wouldn't be given anything to do, so then they would just leave and not come back thinking its not their place. This year, we restructured our team, allowing for centralization, and therefore the head always knowing what there is to do and effectively communicating this. We were able to undertake a re-doing of the room, and completely organized the lab for the first time in a while. We also had the offseason bot project. Now we are looking at effective scouting methods and developing outreach. Basically, there is always something to do and something going on.

2.) Opportunities to gain leadership - Going along with the earlier point made regarding restructuring our team, we were previously extremely mentor involved. This year, we for the first time, had a lot of student leadership. This has motivated lots of people to learn what they want and become a student leader in it, and guide the next generation of students.

3.) Teaching - often people see that we are building a robot and get intimidated thinking they have no engineering background and can't help the team. This is a responsibility of the mentors on most teams, however even student leads can help out. Make sure people know what they are doing, and that you are always open to as many questions as anyone can ask.

4.) Making Sure Students Know About FRC - While this may seem obvious, many new students don't know what FIRST is, or what the goals are. Like Sam said, we held a keynote type meeting in the beginning of the year breaking down how there is a new game every year, and what the time frame of the year will look like. We also went into detail of how there are opportunities to do things in non-technical roles like business, marketing, media, scouting, and outreach. We make sure kids know about all these aspects and how we have a variety of skills they can be involved in.

My first year, wouldn't even be called a year. The structure made it hard for me to understand everything I could do, and I was hesitant to "really" join because of lack of skill in engineering. I didn't even know FRC had different yearly competitions until the end of build season (I thought we were building for fun and made a deadline to help us get it done faster). I didn't know what scouting was, and I only came by every once in a while to help clean up. After realizing how ill-informed I was - I was on the verge of quitting. It all seemed too intimidating and I wanted to leave. But because the team was so encouraging I was motivated to stay, and learn everything I needed to, to make up lost ground and became a team leader. After noticing what I mentioned above, I worked with the team in fixing those problems, and now we have such a great turnout. (Everything mentioned happened last year :D ).

Let me know how everything works out!

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

Based on that I would recommend if you have the money having a few preseason vex teams. With vex more people would be able to get involved and learn applical skills. My team has not personally done this as normally a project like robot improvements could involve everyone we would ever be able to get (we come from a small school) but many teams have had success with this method. Team 254 included.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

If you really want everyone to stay, my suggestion would be to lock the door and not let them leave. Add in some shackles and you can get 100% retention.


The reality is science/engineering is hard. And I don't mean mentally hard but hard on your ego. Most school work is based on coming to preset correct answer. Science/engineering is all about finding out what you don't know or what mistakes you made. A good science experiment in the real world is about getting to the next question. Most real world engineering is about taking the best available information to design something so you can find out what you could have done better. There are a lot of people that don't react well to that - especially if they are used to coming to the correct answer. In addition to the good advice listed already, my suggestion is to make sure that that is a known expectation coming into the program.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

Don't have your first two team meetings revolve around safety, team constructs, or anything that gets new members out of the mindset that they are building things. As soon as they start to become bored or frustrated from the lack of doing anything, they will leave most of the time.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

That sounds interesting - might have to try that next school year.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

What about watching old game animations and talking about designs for that?

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

That sounds really interesting, and I can see that working, but they tried that in my freshmen year and it was really confusing at first, for me at least. I think it has to be executed correctly, like not just showing it to a large crowd of people all at once. I think it works better showing a few people at a time to make sure they're actually paying attention and that they understand the objective. When you talk to a large group all at once, a lot of times most of the group will stay silent and let two or three people do all the talking, so they don't all get the same experience.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

So give me advice on this guys. We always get over 20 new students (freshman) who signup on the "i have interest" sheet. But as soon as they find out that there is no way that there is a huge chance that they wont get to step on the field until they are atleast juniors, and even then they have to be better than others to get that position, 18 our of 20 people leave. This year we only retained one freshman. I try everything I can to keep them interested. I ask what they would like to do, I try to guide them and show them exactly how things need to be done, but they simply don't come back. Especially freshman, 90 perecent of freshman who join are super immature and kick the 2014 balls around and try to drill each others brains out no matter how much I and my mentors try to stop them, until eventualy we have to ask them to stop or leave. What do I do to get them to stop doing that.

Also out of the existing team (11 students) only 4 students actively take part during build season. SO that leads to us 4 having to do more than one task (like cading and programming and building for me). Since build season happens during baseball, soccer, and track season, the other 7 simply can't imagine skipping a day or two of practice a week to do robotics (even though I try to explain that I can find time from playing soccer, and two of the other three also do sports).
Anyone have any advice to rectify both of these problems? Thanks in advance guys.

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.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

[quote=Chief Hedgehog;1589973
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.

[/QUOTE]

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that freshmen are getting less and less mature each year? I'm a sophmore right now, the freshman class last year (the one i was in) was mature and dedicated to the work. The freshman before us were even more mature. But this years freshman are a bunch of goofballs who like to pretend to drill each others brains out and take nothing seriously, and I've been told that next year is even worse :P .

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

I'm a sophomore as well, and a lot of our class was really involved in just extracurriculars in general while this year's freshmen really haven't been. The freshmen we did attract were all fairly mature at least compared to some of their classmate, and even some of my classmates. On the other hand, I've also been told that our incoming freshmen next year are quite a bit worse. I think a lot of it is just how we perceive things to be.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

In Book III of Odes, circa 20 BC, Horace wrote:
I took that Horace quotation from the page at this URL Get off my lawn, pull up your pants, turn down that racket, take out that piercing, get a haircut, cover up that tattoo, put on some decent clothes, stop staring at your phone, and get a real job. :D

There are 14 additional quotes there. One rails against silk umbrellas; :eek: another against playing too much chess. :eek: Apparently there was very little entropy in human society long ago, because things have been steadily going downhill for over 2000 years, and we haven't hit bottom yet.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

There may or may not be a long term trend here, but it's much less than the variation among classes. Each class seems to have it's own levels of maturity, ambition, and commitment. There's plenty of variation within each class, of course. There's no real pattern I've recognized, but it does go back and forth fairly quickly - possibly related to the phase of El Niño / La Niña / Southern Oscillation when they were born:p.

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

There is an ebb and flow for all things - and gauging maturation on a yearly basis is not a great way to measure things. In other words, every year the Middle School Staff tells me that this is the worst group of 8th grade students. Sometimes they are correct, but more often than not they are wrong.

I will let you know if this is the worst group of freshman 3 years from now...

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

From my experience, the perceived maturity of any group of people can be greatly affected by a small group of individuals. You'll have classes come through that have one or two "troublemakers", and those individuals will get everyone riled up and make a bad impression. Then you'll get classes without those individuals, and others will make a strong good impression. Then, when you're talking about taking just a portion of those students for a robotics team, it can be hit or miss - you may get the "good" students one year, and the "troublemakers" the next.

Regardless of who you get on your team, or how they/their class is perceived, our job doesn't change. Both the mentors and the older students need to serve as role models, set expectations, and mentor the new students!

Re: How to Get New Members to Stay?
 

100 percent!