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Re: Looking for some brutally honest feedback...
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Re: Looking for some brutally honest feedback...
Our experience may not be applicable. We are a second year team that is trying to up our game rather ambitiously. Comp and Practice robots. Two Regionals. We are clearly nuts.
But to partially answer the points raised. Our team of 23 has two seniors. One likes to work alone fabbing things. Another is on software. I would say both are less involved than last year. On the other hand our Build team is almost all young. Our two most productive workers, and probable pit crew chiefs, are a 9th grader and an 8th grader (! but he can mill, weld and work sheet metal). Mentors don't build things. I will supervise to reduce waste and slop work. If the team decided plan flops I will make them come up with another idea and for round two will put more specific parts in front of them. Mentors have zero input on decisions such as drive team composition. I have had to push a bit this year. I usually make up the daily work assignments...otherwise we get too many/too few trying to do things where parts are still on order. I allow a moderate amount of failure. (ball shooter subteam is quite adrift...I told them "tough luck, figure it out!"). But team mood appears good. Even the less involved members show up pretty regularly and sign up for Regionals is basically unanimous. The occasional cheer goes up when something works perfectly in testing. On it goes. We are in it for the long haul. Actually as a Mentor roughly 50% of my job is finding things for a few of our more enthused but less adept members to do. Involvement ... but no destroyed parts or injuries.....as a team that takes all interested parties you have to accept a range of abilities. T. Wolter |
Re: Looking for some brutally honest feedback...
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I struggle to get my students involved sometimes. For me, it's about getting these students exposed to applied engineering principles. I do more work than I "should", but I feel like the experience would be a bit more wanting if I am not deeply involved. This is all to say there are all different motivations for students and mentors alike. Your team is very much like a "real world" company in that way- some people want to do as little as possible for their salary- others want to build an empire. Your investigations with how to deal with the problem show you have good intentions. Stay positive, lack of commitment is actually manageable. |
Re: Looking for some brutally honest feedback...
From Mentor Perceptive.
A. "Work has to owned by Team": Meaning ALL Students at ALL Skills can contribute. Even the person Charging Batteries. Work done by mentors is hard to own, by the students! B. "Leadership can Be Learned": Meaning dont limit leadership to Seniors or vetrans.. ( Our Team Programming team Lead is a 1st Year FRC Robotics Student, but eager to work with a Mentor ) C. "Ask Parents or Mentors for Guidance": Meaning build team and network with people in the engineering etc. Parents that are Technical are out there even if there dont have students on the Team... Do Demos are local technical places, not just for sponsors but for mentors! D. "All Teams start with no Structure or Zero Starting Point": Meaning yes teams all start at same point... close to ground zero.. but building from rookie team is FRC!. Some Teams become rookie teams as old team may not sustain. That is normal.. E. Mentor are a the LAST resort to get things done.. Have "How To" learning meetings frequently. F. "Dont get Stuck is Perfection Trap": meaning yes know when things are Good Enough and come back later to it.. Dont Dwell. |
Re: Looking for some brutally honest feedback...
* Our team as a whole does not have its heart in the activity.
There are some things that can't be legislated. Culture and the environment may stem from the mentors and how they manage the team, but at the end of the day, the students have to want it. My team is in its 6th year and I'm glad to say it's a far more cohesive team than it was in year 1. But the mentors had little to do with it; the students made it happen. *Our mentors - Don't get me wrong, they are truly awesome people, but they either don't really have their heart in it, or they are doing the work that the students should be doing. All mentors do some amount of work simply because 6 weeks is too short to do so much. But how much is the key. We aim to let the students do as much as possible but in order to learn, students often do have to watch before they do. That said, you can tell how much our students build by visiting our pit when the robot breaks in competition - there's usually only 1 mentor helping with a repair and several students have their hands on the hardware. Being a good mentor is not easy. I know many who are good technically but don't know how to work with teenagers. Others tell and don't explain. And many can't make the time commitment that it takes to have day-to-day continuity on the team. *Our students - Yet again, we have some truly intelligent and hardworking students, but they lack the commitment that is showing up on time, learning and doing some of the more 'boring' stuff, and taking initiative. One of our "captains" taught themselves over the summer all the ins and the outs of the robot, and thus they are REALLY good at making the robot be awesome. There's 2 facets I struggle with annually - (1) having a team where everyone is involved at some level, and (2) simply being happy that any exposure of STEM to a student is a win. These can sometimes clash. Put another way, I ask "what is the purpose of this team?" Is it just to compete or is there a loftier goal to promote STEM to students who may not otherwise set foot in the door? I can tell you stories of students who are now studying STEM in college who would not otherwise have done so if all we did as a team was focus on the robot. So I don't worry as much about commitment to the robot as I do about showing up and participating in some way - it doesn't have to be with the robot, it can be as an artist for our T-shirt, or writing a Chairman's Award essay. Do I wish all my students would show up on-time? Sure, but I don't stress about it. Students today are pulled in many directions so I work with what I have. *Do you have seniors who do a lot of the work on the team? Yes but not because they are seniors. It's because they have the most experience. Last year we only had one senior (out of a team of over 50) and the juniors did most of the work. This year I have some freshman who are awesome and I expect them to do most of the work next year as sophomores. I always tell my team that each year is different because students graduate and others enroll. We work with who we have. *Do your mentors do a large chunk of the robot work? Not a large chunk. We guide them. We teach them. We let the experienced students teach the newbies. We jump in when needed so that we don't waste the $5K fee! But we have also let students fail in some way because that too is learning. *How involved are the majority of students on your team? Do they do a lot of the work, or do mentors? This varies with each year (as the team changes). We have over 60 students this year and our average group size so far this year is between 20 and 30 students each night. I would guess that maybe 10 students have barely done anything, another 10 are hard-core and have done a lot and 20 have contributed a decent amount. That would leave 20 as occasional contributors. *Do your students learn more by themselves or more from other students and mentors? This varies too. I had one student teach himself to program in C++ over the summer. Another learned how to use WPIlib over many nights at home. But when it comes to learning how to apply physics or how to actually build stuff safely, the students learn from the mentors hands-on. To me, there's no clear-cut, one-size-fits-all way to run a team. There's no ideal team either. When I founded this team, I was given a lot of advice from many people but I quickly realized that each team is different; not just from a demographic point of view but also year to year. What works for one team may not work on mine. So we adjust annually how we organize the team. We set goals but we don't force those goals to be met - we know that it may take some times before we reach them. As I said before we work with who we have. |
Re: Looking for some brutally honest feedback...
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2. This is really a question of perspective. Remember, FIRST's mission is "mentor-based programs". You have teams on every point of the spectrum from no mentors to mentor-built. Its up to your team, both students and mentors, to figure out what the right balance is for you. At different times in my team's history mentors have been asked to step back and do less, or step in and do more. It's a give and take process where the end "level of involvement" is different each year based on the skill and experience of the students involved that year. 3. Involvement is a hard metric to measure. We have 11 students over 90% attendance, another 8 between 70-80%, 3 more over 50% and 3 under 50%. Does that measure involvement? We have students that show up and work solidly through the entire meeting, and others that have to be guided back on task when they get too chatty and forget they're supposed to be working. Like anything else, involvement is a spectrum and all you can do is help each student get the most out of the program based on what they're willing to put into it. 4. We are very focused on having older students pair up with younger students for working, so the younger students can learn as they go. Of course, mentors are there constantly training everyone (even other mentors... just last night I had to show two other mentors how to do adjustments on the mill). We make room for personal growth and encourage students to strike out on their own - our lettering system is based on individual projects the students come up with that demonstrate their mastery of something new. Mentors and older students are always there for them to fall back on and ask questions, however! In the end, a team needs an established structure. You need to create a handbook that lays out how the team operates, and what the expectations are for everyone involved. Everyone needs to agree on it, and then you need to work (over the course of several years!) to ingrain those expectations into the team psyche so it's just "how things are done" and no one has to think about it anymore. At that point, the handbook becomes a handy guide for new team members, and something you can roll up and slap people with if they get out of control :) |
Re: Looking for some brutally honest feedback...
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2. No, students do the vast majority of building and mentors guide along the way. Designing is usually a collaboration between mentors and students, but student led as well. 3. Students are very involved. We have a minimum attendance requirement, but most students choose to show up to every one of our six day a week meeting. 4. Students learn more from working with other students and mentors. Any sort of team collaboration allows different experiences to be shared and more learning to occur. We used to struggle with commitment, and had an extremely senior-heavy team in 2014, however since that drop off we have rebuilt into a team that involves all students. We have about 28 students and around 8 mentors. Parents help out a lot too. We don't do a whole lot of team building or anything like that, most of our student engagement comes from students being able to do things. |
Re: Looking for some brutally honest feedback...
1. I would say that the seniors do ~60% of the work. But this is mostly due to a gap year where we have no junior hardware people.
2. Our mentors are strictly administrative / consultational. They havent touched the cad or the robot in years. Only exception may be one of our mentors doing CAM to prep for his CNC mill. 3. The vast majority of members are in the robotics room every day during build season. 4. ~99% of all teaching is done by students. As hardware lead, it's my responsibility to make and present lesson plans to teach SolidWorks, general robot design, and how to make subsystems. This also includes cadding conventions and grabcad rules. I think your team needs to build a culture around the students teaching each other. It feels much less like a chore to learn from students than mentors. |
Re: Looking for some brutally honest feedback...
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1) Seniors do a lot, juniors do a lot, everyone that has a time commitment is invested. That being said we have been hit hard on scheduling this year so there is a sense of urgency... for whatever that's worth. 2) I'm not going to lie here, mentors do a lot. But not because we are trying to do things in place of students. Students are encouraged to jump in and take control to some extent, with mentors providing direction. That being said there are several student lead projects with very little mentor overhead, i.e. Chairmans. As mentors, a lot of what we do is 'prep work' or indirectly contributing to a project. Usually, there is a student there to reap the benefits themselves. (Side Note: if you have a relatively inexperienced team/team-members: there will be a lot of teaching that is also robot building. A lot of building a robot is Show, Tell, Now-You-Try. (Such as teaching someone to drill & tap a hole)). 3) Like I said we have scheduling(ish) issues. However, over my years of FRC involvement, there has always been a core of ~10 students that were involved in 80% of the work (typically these students are the ones in it for the 'long haul') and there is a lot of screwing around by the remaining students. Generally, the less involved students are not the ones to jump in and take control of a project and need tasks given to them, this accounts for a lot of 'standing around' if a mentor or a team captain doesn't get them doing something. A lot of this is in the confidence to work on a project, not everyone is sure of their abilities and not afraid to fail. 4) This is highly variable on each student, and how experienced your mentors are for that matter. I do not know how your team is structured, but discrete projects that people can become 'experts' in is beneficial IMO. Personally, I learn more on my own and use other mentors (and students :D ) expertise as a crutch if I need it. I hope you get it all figured out, regroup, and kick some butt! -Skye Leake |
Re: Looking for some brutally honest feedback...
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1,2 - We strive to be a student run team. Our very large size allows us to do this effectively year in an year out. 3 - Usually a small number of students end up creating the final robot on the field, although the majority of the team is in some way involved. The amount of "work" done by mentors tends to be small. 4 - Hard to know, the amount of self-startering varies widely from person to person. Usually this type of student ends up in the leadership. |
Re: Looking for some brutally honest feedback...
1) Yes, but the new members are always taught how to do everything and participate as much as they want to. We want to make sure that they feel welcome and want to stay and work on the robot. Someone has to do it when we're gone.
2) They advise us on large decisions and assist us while making critical designs. But no. 3) All of the students that attend our meetings find something to do. Even if it is not with their primary sub-team. 4) Sub-team captains are responsible for teaching other students. The entire new member education process is lead by students. |
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