Too large of a team?
 

Our team next year will have 140+ members. This year we had 84 and honestly didn't know what to do with all these people. Freshmen usually join robotics to build a robot because they don't know all the aspects of robotics and what FIRST and the Chairman's Award is about. So when we put them on teams such as Lego or Scouting, they drop out of the club.

Now our numbers are going up. This time we will try and make a larger point of what FIRST and Robotics is about in the hopes that we can keep all of our members. We are trying to enter more engineering contests and other things like that. But is there anyone out there who has experience with large number teams that could help us in better organizing ourselves.

Right now we have a scouting team, outreach comittee, fundraising comittee, technical team, FLL Mentor team, Jr. FLL Mentor team, VEX robotics team, FIRST Build Team, Promotional Team, and a BEST robotics team. With all these teams, it is still hard to keep people interested and active.

Jr. FLL, VEX, and the Promotional team are all new this year, But we have no idea about how to make sure that we keep all these people. It may even be 150+ kids that join the club next year.

Please help us in finding out how to keep our club solid with this many people.
If there is another thread jsut liek this, sorry. I searched and found threads about organization, but none that dealt with organization of teams with large numbers. Thanks

Re: Too large of a team?
 

How about sending some of those members out to us, we've got about 15. :)

Perhaps it would be possible to split to two teams? I'm not sure about this, especially when it comes to the aspects of money and room, but it's an idea nonetheless.

As of know, I can't really see anything else your team can do (;)) beyond what you have, sounds like a great progam, though.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Wow!

I don't know how many of those are really advanced (robotics wise) but there are always college type robotics competitions or even professional competitions like the DARPA Grand Challenge (too late for this year but start building, this will take you a year).

I totally agree with Josh distribute your students to other teams... We sure would like it!

If you have the money (which you can make with that many students) you can build two robots. I am not exactly sure what the rules say for this, so you might not be able to switch those during the competition. I think about this like that: Have either two identical robots, that would enable you to make changes without risking anything (especially during competition) and even if one of them brakes -- you just take another robot...
The other version would be having two different robots. This means you could have two groups in your teams work on one each. If you would co-ordinate it right one robot could be more offense and the other more defense (or what ever you need in next year's competition), one strong, the other fast...

Well, you see where I am going, think about it!

Or add a European Support team ;-)

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Sorry, I forgot about creating this team. lol

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Team 1640 had the total opposite problem last year...not enough people. Anyways, sounds like too many. Try two teams like someone said above.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

You could create an application process that's required to join the team. The application wouldn't be used to turn students down, but rather to get a better understanding of what their interests are and what they would be good at. It could help organize the team into areas of interest to the students.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Applications are also a good way to weed people out. You can still make it such that everybody that turns in an application is accepted onto the team (which I am in favor of), but the simple act of turning in an application and actually putting the work into it will deter some of your "tag-a-long" people and give you the people who really want to be there.

In all, don't fear the large team, use it to make an even larger difference.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Go to the link to get an idfea of a FIRST Application this is what we use. Team 237's Online Application

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Well, first off, the phrase "is our team too large" or "how can we reduce the size" indicates that there is some issue with team size. Are some of these students not doing anything? Maybe that may be the determining factor. Are all 140 of these students from the same high school? How many mentors do you have? These questions may help you into splitting into two teams. If you want to stay one team, then I would suggest 1 of 2 options.

-Option 1: Dismiss students who are not doing anything on the team. With 140 members (or the 80 some you said you had this year) I can't possibly imagine that all members are actively participating. Tell them that you are glad that they were interested, but you need to keep only active students.

-Option 2: Have a team where only juniors and seniors travel. If your issue is with travel budgets (which I imagine that it is) then this would help. Allow all kids to participate in the build season but reserve travel privilages for juniors and seniors or those who have been on the team for 2 years or something.

Good luck and congrats on establishing a team that so many students want to participate on!

Re: Too large of a team?
 

That is absolutely huge. Whatever mentor that has to deal with that number of kids deserves some sort of award or something.

Anywhow, I think your application/entry process is not strict enough. Making your team smaller can be a very wise move.

To me, one of the great things about FIRST has always been that unlike many other clubs/activities, it is not something people join just to say they did it or just to say they are in it or just to help get into college or whatever. People join and stay involved because they care, and because they want to learn and progress their skills. To me, it seems unlikely that all 140 people are in it for this reason. If there is anyone in it just to be in it, that is no good. Yes all colleges care about is how many clubs you were in in high school but to me it is useless if you are not a key member who is really devoted.

I would rather see you let fewer people be more involved and gain more from the program rather than let all these people be in it just so they can say so.

If you don't want to reduce the number of people, I'd say split into two or even three teams, or build two or three alike or different (probably better/more fun to go with different ones) robots during the build season.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

I'm guessing that the majority of them aren't kids, and are mentors from GT who 1002 is partnered with.

If you actually have 140 dedicated people, good luck. I don't see any possible way that you can effectively and efficiently use all of them.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

If the data I found (here) is correct, that would mean you have 15% of your students participate. Wow!

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Wow. As countless people before me have stated, with that many students, if you're coming from two or more different schools, you may want to split up the team between schools to make it more managable if all 80 -140 students are truly active in it. Although, from my experience, a separation of the team was absolutely unthinkable.

last year i had a team of 72 students. the year before that, there were about 52. i've found, that when it comes to a robotics team, sometimes having too many people around can be counterproductive. you can only have so many hands in a small space (lets say a gearbox), so that leaves a lot of people bored and not doing anything. What i would suggest (this is something we have been doing for years) is creating requirements for going on trips, like having dedicated x amout of hours to the team working on whatever (spirit stuff, building the robot, chairman's award, website, etc.) and they need to have participated in y amount of fundraisers throughout the year. (i'd suggest you start with the fundraising now if you havent already, especially with having a team that large). the basic reasoning behind this is that it shows you (on paper!) who is really dedicated to the team, and who is a slacker. (although there are innovative slackers who find ways around this.. but i'm sure you can figure out how to deal with them) The requirements for each regional you go to (if you go to more than one) can change accordingly; for the more expensive regionals, the team members have to work harder to attend it.

Also, (i'm not sure if this will work; my team is going to try it this year and let everyone know how it went...) you could try to divide your team. I know it sounds crazy, because we all love teamwork, but you cant have 50 people try to be on pit crew and have no one work on Chairman's Award. it just doesnt work like that. Pit crew gets nothing done, and Chairman's Award doesnt get the attention it needs. You can develop your own partitioning system, but this year (instead of last year, where we had about 15 or more separate chaotic groups) we are separating the team into 3 groups: Public Relations (PR), Mechanical, and Information Technology (IT). within these group there are separate divisions... for example, in the PR group, there are divisions for fundraising, public relations, spirit, chairmans/woody flowers awards, and more. Students can move around between these divisions as they wish, but they cannot change groups and suddenly wish to be on the Pit Crew if they've been working on Spirit stuff. this increases the teamwork between students within each group... so its like having 3 separate, more managable teams within your own large team... in theory. but i'm not sure, thats just what we figured should happen.. but you never know.

i hope this helps.. and good luck with your team almost doubling in size...

oh, in regards to scouting-- dont just have a separate little circle of people for scouting. thats boring for them and its not fair that everyone gets to have fun at the competition, but they have to sit for long periods of time and watch robots... not that theres anything wrong with that, but everyone needs a break after looking at scouting sheets for ... ever. so--especially with such a large team-- teach everyone to scout, and have everyone scout 1 to 2 hour shifts at competition. That way, you make good use of your man/woman power, and no one has an excuse to not understand the game. (my advice, watch a webcast together to learn to scout together if you're not competing in the first week).

ok i think i've put in my $0.02 and then some... i know generally people hate long posts, but i made this as concise as possible while still giving the best advice i could. good luck again! :)

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Having such a large amount of students is often a difficult situation. In my opinion, I don't really consider dropping people or limiting admissions an option, and as far as splitting the team in two, like it's been said, that depends entirely on space and money. This past season Heatwave had 100+ students join the team in September, by the time we got to January we only had about 70 members active, but not all of which traveled to both regionals and nationals. It is my personal goal to try and get nearly 100 members this year and keep at least 90 of them active.

I'm working on some "unofficial" ideas about splitting the team into sub-teams, similar to what you, then winged wonder mentioned. By splitting the team up I intend to get people placed into these groups and have them devote their efforts to one or more of the teams. I hope that this will give everyone the opportunity to actually do something for the team. With each of these teams geared toward a specific aspect of a FIRST team and with both a mentor and responsible student in charge of each team. If it works right, it should almost be like teams within a team, and hopefully work out if everything goes well. But, this is just my idea, it may work for you, it may not, it's only still in a sort of "development stage"

Good luck to your team
^good point. Hope you figure something out.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

...waiting for someone from 862 to post, other than me...

OK, no one posted from our team. We topped out at 72 students this year. With 3 active mentors, that's rough. But we don't kick anyone out. If you show up and you want to learn, listen, turn something on the lathe, rivit some metal, whatever - as long as you get something out of it.

Us mentors really don't do anything but direct traffic. Not because we don't want to, or blah blah blah... but because if I tighten a nut, that's something, someone could have done.

It got so bad we were going to attach each freshmen to a tool every day. If we needed that tool, they did the work. Tools could rotate each day. Hacksaw was tired every day. Chainbreaker was always Chainbreaker - because that was his nickname, and he was the only one who could work it.

We fear that we may break 100 next year. Wait, who am I kidding. We have over 100 signed up from 8th grade, plus the 60 or so returning students.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Even though our team has never had that sort of crowd, I have helped teams who have gone thru that situation. Well, there are many options - people above me gave you some good advice. First, how many mentors[responsible and working] do you have? Second, how many student leaders do you have? The more responsible people you have on the team, the bigger of a team you can handle. What I would suggest is going back into the The Awards section and see how your team can participate in almost everything. Divide[create sub groups] the team accordingly. Now, some things are just not going to work out. You can choose to have an application process or something. Workshops and team get togethers are a great way to inspire students. Sometimes what you need to do is get to know some of the kids personally, you are going to find one winner who will love FIRST, it takes some effort. Anyways, my idea would be to give all the members 2 months on the team as grace period - make sure they know the different things they can do on the team. Then, after that you interview them and see who is responsible - who is useful - who is a just slacking off - who is useless - who is causing trouble. You definitely want to eliminate those causing trouble - it's up to you to see if you want to keep the slackers and such - depending on funds and whatever other factors you can think of. Every team is different. In many teams 20% of the kids do 80% of the work - so don't feel bad if you see too many kids not doing anything.

Go into the white papers section of CD and look thru all the white papers. Put together a handbook for your team. As I said there are many options, look to see what works best for you. Feel free to talk to me further if you need help.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

This coming season (2006) is the strangest ever for getting new members on our team. (we just got them). We do have a rather formal application process, but when opened to the whole school (840 students in grades 9-11) for more than two weeks, all we got were 6 applications back. And 5 of the 6 are girls, how about that!?! So anyway, we let them all in. But if we got more than 6 applications, we would have said "sorry" to some of them. That was decided ahead of time. We will also be letting two freshmen join when they start in the fall. That's a total of 8 new members and a total of approximately 11 returning members.

On such a small team, the amount that each person gets out of it is just tremendous; I love it!

Re: Too large of a team?
 

First of al, congratulations for getting that many students interested in your team! Itmeans you are doing some awesome marketing and public relations!

If you haven't already done so, I suggest the team members (students and mentors) determine a number limit that is managable (on RAGE it was determined two years ago that the team could support 40 students with its resources; financial, mentor, space, etc.) where everyone who is on the team would get something out of it. Spend the summer writing up a team handbook which explains your number limit, the application process, and defines a date whereby you will no longer accept applications. It should also spell out the requirements of being on the team, attendance policies, contributing to the work of the team, etc. Some teams require X hours per week, X number of dollars raised for fundraising, plus maintain a high academic standing (I am on the fence about that requirement...) . Some teams require a fee upon application - this weeds out a lot of people but the fee is applied to the students' costs (t-shirts, travel, whatever), or requires that a student raise x number of dollars in sponsorships in order to join the team.

Establish a policy for who gets to travel (traveling and getting out of school are a lure for many students). Check with your school to see if you can implement these requirements (if your school acknowledges that you are a "team" like a sports team, then you can usually "weed out" people who are not contributing to the team; if your school defines you as a "club" then you may have to be inclusive of everyone who joins, but with established cutoffs, etc. you may be able to get around it).

Hold an Open House and make it mandatory that students and parents/guardians attend. Be clear about expectrations, time and financial committment. Explain this is not to scare them off, but to inform them so they can make a good decision if they want to join or not. Each applicant gets a copy of the handbook which they and a parent must sign.

If you follow procedures like this you will weed out the ones that are really not that interested.

I have also heard of the model where a team formed a separate marketing/spirit/artwork team to support the robotics team, almost like a booster club.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

The one thing I havent exactly heard here is starting a business team. We are going to have a business team that will take care of budgeting, watching over the fundraising, establishing & maintaining our handbook, student database (to record requirements fulfillment), a team newsletter, travel organization, and hopefully we are going to do a bunch of presentations & panels for the school that cover a range of business topics & things they will need for college.

We are doing an application this year, mostly just to collect needed info, as well as figure out what the students are interested so we can better get them involved. If the numbers get huge someday, it might be used to weed out, but only if we are out of resources to support it.

Other than that I will just quick list all the Subteam activities we have (some of them get lumped together since we are still a small team):
Mechanical, Fabrication, Electrical, Pneumatics, Programming, Webpage, Photo/Video, Spirit/Logo, Marketing, Awards, Community Service, Animation, Strategy/Drive/Rules, Business, Fundraising & Team Leadership.

I also like the idea mentioned here to take a look at all of the awards FIRST gives... not so much to win the awards, but just to get ideas of what your team could do for extra tasks. Take a look at the structure of some of the chairmans teams as well, you will likely get some ideas on more things you can do.

Good luck!

Re: Too large of a team?
 

I realize that it is very easy to suggest splitting the team, but in reality money and resources can make that impossible, so I'll skip that. (Even with over 100 students you can easily tap out fundraising in an area).

If building and operating the robot is considered the "best" team, why don't you make it the ultimate goal for the students? For example, each student has to spend, say, their first year on fundraising and spirit, then their second year on Lego League, third year on BEST or VEX, then in their final year, those who stayed around and have shown the ability, can join the robot team. This of course would require a four year commitment so you may want to scale it down.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Sorry for th minor confusion about BEST. Our BEST team is a team that competes in another competition called BEST which stands for Boosting Engineering Sience and Technology. It is a smaller scale robotics competition.
Ok guys. We have 140 people expected actually more than that next year
in our club. We have a magnet program within our school and that is
where we get most of our students from. We only have 3 mentors from
our school and we work along side GT. In that number of 140+ GT is not
included.

We do have an application process which allows us to help move certain
people into certain teams. Each team has its own leader. Our business
team that was mentioned kind of is our promotion team and fundraising
team balled into one. Here is a break down of our club right now.

BEST Team= Participates in the building of the BEST robot. (9th and 10th)

Fundraising Committee= headed by the treasurer. The Fundraising Team
helps look for sponsorships. Schedule Fundraising events that the
entire team is supposed to help out with by attending (all grades).

Tech Team= designs trading cards, website handling, t-shirt graphics,
robot CAD, banner design, creates scouting Database, Runs the Cyber
Center, etc. (all grades)

Outreach Committee= schedules most of the outreach events. (All grades)

Scouting Team= takes part in scouting out other teams. Helps with team
spirit and promoting our team at competitions. (all grades)

Lego Team= Mentors Lego Teams twice a week. Helps teach at FLL work
shops. Will be responsible for starting Jr. Lego League teams in the
county. (All grades)

FIRST Team= this team designs and builds the FIRST robot. (11th and 12th)
WE are mentored by Georgia Tech. They help guide us when it comes to
the design of the robot and building it.

VEX Team= If we are picked will build the VEX robot and if not we
mentor the other teams because we had to build 17 of the demo vex bots
for nationals

Promotional team= promotes the team (no idea of what we really are
doing with this team)

2 FRC teams are most likely out of the question. We spent $52k this
year. And that was a lot. So I doubt we will have 2 teams. And there
are multiple teams in our county making it very hard to get money.

Our FRC team only consists of like 15 members. This helps us because
otherwise we would be killing ourselves with 140 people down there
trying to build.

We open our club to everyone in our school because we want everyone to
be able to experience robotics. All of our members who want to go on
trips can go on trips and this year, to be able to go on trips, you
have to attend a certain % of the meetings outreach events and
fundraising events.

We don't want a smaller team. We want a team that is more involved.
Last year with 80 something members we only had like 30 come to our
meetings.

Thank you guys so much for all of your input. Sorry for such a long post.
There are a few issues with our system and we are just trying to fix it.
That attendance% is lower than Shaq's ft %. I just want
everyone to some how stay interested. People join
robotics not knowing what robotics is all about. They want to build
and they don't understand that if they stay with the club, that they
will move to a build team.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

we actually have only 3 mentors and 3 student executives. we also have a team leader for each team within our team.

for our FRC built team, we have Georgia Tech students to help mentor.

I would like to be able to give all the new members something to do, because this year about 25% of the people did 90% of the work.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

I think this comment is totally inappropriate. I'd send some negative rep over your way, but I'd rather express my opinion on your comment publicly.

How are freshmen supposed to learn and supposed to be excited about the program when all they hear is "stupid freshmen"? What an insult. Very maliciously amateur if you ask me. :mad: How is that supposed to be Inspiring? IMHO that statement lies just on the edge of bullying, which is being targeted by lawmakers and school officials across the country. A comment like that leads me to believe that you and/or your team needs a big shift of values. If you think freshmen are stupid, that is your opinion but I point you to this list of reminder threads before you ever think about making another comment like that again.

Also, I believe you are making a big mistake by only allowing 11th and 12th grade on the FRC build team.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Well I am sorry for the quot you posted. It was a joke towards teh freshman who was with me while I was making the post. I didn't think about all th freshmen on the board that might have become offended. That comment in no way reflects what our club thinks or believes in.

We are realizing after this past year that 11th and 12th graders only on our FRC Build team is bad because 1/2 of our experience is lost which is why we are trying to think about letting sophmores and freshmen on. The thing about it is that our sophmores and Freshmen have not yet taken any of the AP Physics classes or Post AP Robotics. We try and use BEST robotics as a stepping stone towards FIRST so that freshmen and sophmores aren't overwhelmed by FIRST. Overwhelmed by the knowledge needed and the time commitment.

In regards to another previous question, we are only 1 school.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Santosh,

As an older member on your team, you are the one in charge of teaching them what it's about. While I know that you apologized above for your comment, I want to remind you that a big part of FIRST is to educate everyone, even those "stupid freshmen" about science and technology. Yes, you were trying to make a joke, and that's fine, however, you really need to watch what you say if you want people to take it correctly. That's part of the problems with typing, not enough emotional expression.

As to the part about not wanting to decrease your team size, the issue that you are experiencing occurs with every team no matter what the size. There will always be people who want to be active and there will always be those who are in it to see what they can get. As to making the others more dedicated? Well, that is one somewhat negative thing about our competition. There is a limited amount of work that can be done and a limited number of people that can do it. Perfect project management would allow the maximum number of people to do the maximum amount of work to stay productive, but sometimes, there's just not enough for everyone to do. Keep everyone as busy as you can, and if they choose not to be active, don't give up on them, just keep working with them. Maybe next year they'll change their thoughts when they see how much those who participated actively got out of it. And here's one quick hint that some people don't want you to know. There are some people that, no matter what, FIRST just won't make a difference for. There are some who won't be affected. So just try to make them have as much fun as they can, while they are with the team.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

First of all, we had a freshman on the team last year and two sophomores this year, while our BEST team was all freshman and sophomores. We base the team ppl are on by their prior experience, knowledge, and why they tell us they want to be on a team. Sorry again for the stupid freshman comment, that was inappropriate. The fact is, when people sign up for robotics for the first time, they often dont know the extra commitment it takes compared to many of the other clubs at our school. After freshmen year, people join the club based more on what their friends tell them about it and what they see then just the name "Robotics". Freshmen dont hav this opportunity to find out about the club b/c they are just coming into the school. I can say this b/c when I was a freshmen I had no idea what I was getting into when i signed up, but the commitment was no problem for me, i enjoy this stuff, so I stayed on and as a sophomore this year I made the First build team.

By the way, we use the clubs as stepping stones, lego in middle school, Best 9th and 10th, then First (although u can go straight to first if u show the qualities needed). The fact is, we dont hav enough room to just put ppl on our First build team, everyone has a big job and they have to know how to do their job or the robot will not work, period. To put someone on First before theyre ready would be pointless when we hav other Build teams that can prepare them for the First build team so well. I dont know where ur hate or upsetment over such small misunderstandings, but I hope u wont make the same misjudgements in the future, b/c that kind of stuff hurts everyone involved in first robotics and really everyone period.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Well, that's normal. If some of these kids leave the team, it's probably for the good. If you have 15 productive FRC members then you're probably doing great. It looks like your team is put into strong sub-groups and is productive.Your organization looks fine, the team operations looks fine... I think you're set. Some committees (like fund-raising) might need to work harder than others because of the size of the team, but that's just the way things are.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

We do allow students of all ages to join FIRST, if they show that they have experience. for example, I joined our FRC team as a freshman, and im still there now as a Senior.

the club has grown a lot since then, though.

we need someone to do the other parts, even if few want to. if they prove they are willing to work andcan commit the time for FRC, then they can do it.

Re: Too large of a team?
 

Hi, I'm one of the surprisingly few GT students working with the team. Despite what people may think about GT, being that it is a Tech school, our numbers are surprisingly low. We only have about 10 college mentors working with the FIRST team, and 2 of those were recent grads from Wheeler.

The great thing about this team is that by growing the FIRST team through Wheeler, we grow our robotics team at Tech. It has been working out pretty well so far, but as far as the GT side goes, our problem is money, space, and experience. We have more than enough ideas to occupy everyone, but not enough money to buy parts, not enough experience to have leaders for every project, and certainly not enough space to work on so many projects. We are trying to work more off-season to give more experience to the high school leaders, hopefully so that it will trickle down and benefit the whole team. If I had to work with all of the students, my head would explode.

Jevawn Roberts
Co-Leader GTFIRST
President RoboJackets