Team Building Exercises
 

I am currently holding the position of Team Co-Leader so I help run the team meetings we have on a bi-weekly basis to talk about what projects are being worked on and current events coming up. Recently I have tried including a team building exercise into the meetings to help get the team members more acquainted with each other, which on its first time worked amazingly but I've been having problems trying to think of other simple ideas for team building exercises.

What team building exercises does your FRC team do to help build team relationships and skills?

Re: Team Building Exercises
 

Team building is a very important challenge to tackle even before you begin thinking about building robots. On my team specifically (148), we try to knockout two birds with one stone wherever possible by using simple and fun design challenges as team building exercises. This gives students a chance to start developing a problem solving skill set all while getting to have fun and meet their fellow team mates.

Here is a link to a video of a Pumpkin Chunkin' contest we held one preseason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOgdZGcj9_I

We were able to divide team members up into groups that included a good spread of rookies and veterans as well as a few mentors. While the size of this event may not be what you had in mind, it can certainly be scaled to fit your needs. Competition is also a great force for bonding, as we can all attest from years of FIRST involvement. Congrats on your appointment, and I hope this can help you think of some great ideas for your team.

Re: Team Building Exercises
 

If you look up Destination Imagination Instant Challenges, there are a lot of good ones that require both design skills and a lot of creativity (most of them have a theatrical portion as well, so it can be a good way to get newer members out of their shells).

Re: Team Building Exercises
 

One important thing that I found while conducting team building activities is humor. Make whatever you are doing funny, whether it be throwing pumpkins or solving a grid logic puzzle. A little self deprecation on the part of whoever the leader is going to be is never a bad idea; however, they do need to know where the line is so that the team members they are supposed to be supervising don't respect their authority.

I would also go so far as to separate the team based on their individual roles during build season, and have the individual sub-team leaders conduct the team building.

I would then highly recommend conducting follow up team building after build season is over but before you go to competition in order to help facilitate the transition. Because as I'm sure it is on most teams, individual roles change once the team actually gets to competition, which usually means that new people are in charge and the make up of individuals on specific teams is different.

Re: Team Building Exercises
 

We just went through a pretty bad experience with team building exercises. Here are some of the lessons learned:
- Team building exercises appeal to socially minded, extroverted personality types. Be mindful that there introverts on your team for whom team building exercises are torture.
- Make them opt-in, not mandatory.
- If possible, make them as relevant and applicable to robotics as possible. For example, if you are doing design challenges, make the challenge to design something which can be used as a subsystem of your robot.
- If the students participate, then the mentors do, too. If it's not valuable enough for full mentor participation, it's not valuable for the students, either.


Essentially, do everything you can to avoid requiring students to participate in something they view as a waste of their time.

Re: Team Building Exercises
 

Did it involve students re-painting an extreamly loud car?:ahh:

Re: Team Building Exercises
 

Nope. That would have been a total hit, I'm sure.

Re: Team Building Exercises
 

You could always invite a couple of nearby teams to a lock-in at a trampoline park.

It's an absolute blast and a great way to mingle with other excited FIRST students. We're doing it again this year and hope it will be as great for team-building as it was last year. :D