Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

I had always heard that he was sitting on a bus, but agree that the shower seems very conducive to idea generation.

As per the topic at hand. The issue your team is now dealing with is just another thing that is very "real world" about this program. In my wife's previous job, she was limited to 40 hours per week due to budgetary issues, with zero exceptions. She was not permitted to work without being clocked in or to work from home. She is in the hotel event planning business, which is most definitely NOT a 9-5 job. Those in her department not on an hour count average more than 50 hours a week. She had to learn to manage her time more wisely and (as has been mentioned earlier in this thread) "work smarter".

We run our team more like a team than a club. We expect the same level of dedication as the football, swim, or basketball team expects from its members. With that said, the mentors all fully support having "well-rounded" students. We had athletes, musicians, Eagle Scouts, members of regional church youth planning groups, etc, on this year's team. I've always said that high school is the time to do a lot of activities and college is the time to focus on one and become very dedicated to it.

Work with your school to set reasonable boundaries. If they are dead-set on 200 hours, you'll just need to learn to deal with that. 3.5 hours / day (3 - 6:30 for you) x 5 days / week x 6 weeks = 105 hours. This gives you 95 hours to play with on weekends. Assuming 6 weekends, this is more than 15 hours / weekend. This isn't an impossible request. Had they said you had 50 hours, then yes, protest your heart out. But 200 hours doesn't seem to be that bad.

Each team is different and forced to learn what is going to work best for them. That which does not kill you will only make you stronger. Learn from this opportunity. Good luck.

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

Most of our members don't log anywhere near 200+ hours in the build season, but our captains and core members are typically around 200 or so hours. I know I logged over 200 hours this season, all while taking university courses and commuting between home, the university, and robotics. I didn't miss a single build time (although I had to leave early a couple times) and my grades stayed the same.

It's definitely manageable to log a lot of hours, but I understand why the school might want to set a limit. 500 hours in 6 weeks averages almost 12 hours per day. When you factor in (approximately) 6-7 hours for school 5 days per week, that leaves only 5-6 hours for homework, sleeping, and everything else. It's awesome that there are people who are this committed to robotics, but at that point, I would start worrying about their health.

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

I put in a lot of time in high school. I used to stay until 2am some weeknights. There were some overnights when preparing for pre-ship events. I was also taking a full load of AP classes, working and playing varsity basketball. So I had a lot to do but somehow (lots of Mountain Dew) I got it all done successfully.
Honestly, I think I wouldn't have learned as much if someone had capped my hours. I certainly wouldn't know about time or project management.

The team I graduated from no longer has as insane hours. Now meetings end before 11pm. The team has grown so the work is more spread out. Overall, they meet for fewer hours but are still a successful team, in fact they could be considered even more successful now.
This was done by doing work outside of meetings and making the team more efficient. There are lots of emails and other communication messages so that everyone knows what needs to get done before the meeting starts. CAD has also become very important and helps save design time.

With every team I work with, Fridays and Sundays are off unless something horrible has happened then we might meet for a few hours on Friday.

I think it would be difficult to meet with those times because of them availability of mentors. It might also be hard if the students need to work on things after school. My teams meet from about 5-9 but students can come early to work on homework, eat, CAD, etc.

I'm surprised to say that based on the average number of hours we would be able to function with those limits. However, I know that without the people who went over the average then the team wouldn't be as successful.
21 students worked an average of 15 hours during the pre-season. 9 mentors worked an average of 28 hours. There were 12 pre-season meetings. This time includes work done outside of meetings for students but not for mentors. The reason the mentors have a higher average is because some of the students only came to a meeting or two.
17 students worked an average of 85 hours during the build season. 15 mentors worked an average of 72 hours during the build season. The students worked an average of 40 hours after the robot shipped. The mentors worked an average of 29 hours after the robot shipped. This time includes work done outside of meetings for students but not for mentors.
I think I need to re-run these numbers because they seem low.

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

As someone who is starting to get into this whole "real world" thing, I can tell you that's simply not true. There are countless situations in the real world where time caps are in place for many reasons. Labor laws, union regulations, funding issues, work site availability, and contract stipulations are all very frequent reasons for why time limits exist in the real world. Collin gave an example of one situation just a couple posts ago.

Time caps are part of the real world, and the team may very well have to find a way to work with them. 200 hours isn't a terribly small amount of time. Based on some scratch paper calculations and my fuzzy memory, I doubt I spent much more than 200 hours in any particular build season I've been involved in. And I know that the average student on my teams definitely doesn't spend more than 200 hours.
If you feel you need more time, work to try and raise the cap. But it will likely be much easier to make exceptions for individual students rather than the team as a whole. Especially if the key students who need to spend more time also have great grades.

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

Exactly. Another example is with government contracts - legally, you are obligated to log every hour spent working the contract so you can bill the government (to prevent anti-competitive situations where a company low-balls a bid in order to win it and then has employees work unrecorded hours to execute).

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

As someone who is in a significantly different "real world" I can say your mileage may vary. Some industries have labor laws or funding limits that limit your amount of time. My company has neither of these. I know people who have left the building at 4 am and been back at 8 am the next day. It isn't normal but the job must get done. But that is not normal. It is usually because of an emergency (server explodes) or because they broke something. Or it could just be because they have nothing better to do.

In FIRST though you don't get fined when your robot doesn't work at 100% by week 3 of the build season. There is absolutely no reason to kill yourselves. Remember, this is supposed to be fun.

As for the specific number. 200 hrs in 6 weeks works out to 33 hrs a week. I don't know about your school but I know that is a crazy amount of time if you add it onto the 35-40 hrs/ week of school. How do your mentors even spend that much time there? I know that the thought of spending 30+ hrs a week in addition to the 40+ (sometimes as high as 60) I work in a week would kill me.

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

If I was in your situation I would bring up statistics of people from your school on the robotics team and not on the robotics team and prove to the administration that robotics hours don't hurt grades. I personally always did better in school during the second term because robotics forced me to become more organized.

We have problems with our teacher not wanting to be in the lab enough and have 2 meetings a week for the first 3 weeks. One thing we try to do to make up for this lack of time is meet up at someone's house on days when we don't have meetings and discuss our plans for the next couple of days and do everything we can do outside of the lab.

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

Ok I re-ran the numbers so it is no longer based on averages. My smaller team would be able to meet the 200 hour restriction but it would require more students to step up to help balance the work load. It would also require more of the design, awards, etc to be done outside of team meetings. So 200 hours is definitely possible not only for the build season but for the whole season if your team is organized and on the smaller side.

My larger team would not be able to do this. My larger team has a website group, animation group, course group, and video group unlike my smaller team. The other subgroups are also bigger on this team so the team is able to accomplish more (as far as complex designs, team outreach, etc).

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

the most (recorded) hours put into the robot by any of our members was 104. i say recorded, because i know i put in a lot that i just didn't clock in for. but to get to the point, i think that you could easily fit within the new restraints. we did fairly well, and are always improving. we just work every year on working more efficiantly.

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

As the Head Coach & Mentor of the team (1540) facing these restrictions, a little background might be in order.

Our team is based at a small top-tier private school, Catlin Gabel in Portland, OR, with 280 students in the entire high school. We had 25 students on our team this season. Therefore, when robotics is in full swing the impact on students and thus the minds of the faculty is big. Students are required to log at least 50 hours in the fall and 50 during build season to be on the team. The average for build season was 120hrs, median 108hrs. One student logged 350+ hrs, another around 300. All the rest were below 200.

Our robot is entirely student designed and built. I say this as a way of underlining the fact that the students know that if they don't get something done, the mentors aren't going to fill in the gaps. That can lead to some excessive hours for those deeply invested.

Our school doesn't have grades in the normal sense. There are written comments on each student's performance at various intervals throughout the year. They then synthesize a letter grade for colleges at the end of the year.

This school is incredibly intense, with 100% going on to college, often to Ivy league schools. The normal homework load on a given night is 4-6 hours. Every class is basically AP, though we don't call it that. The students sometimes negotiate extensions for big assignments that happen during build season.

Our team has just finished up our sixth year. This year there were complaints from the faculty that robotics was having too big an impact on the academic performance of several of our students. That triggered a review of the program and hence the caps being discussed.

The caps would be:
200 hours max per student IN THE LAB. What they do outside of the lab is their business.

3:00-6:30pm on school nights in the lab. Open until 10:00pm on non-school nights.

Saturdays 10:00am-10:00pm

Holidays 10:00am-6:30pm

Sundays 10:00am-6:30pm near ship, otherwise closed.


While I wasn't a fan of artifical caps when they were first brought up, I've come to see them as just another constraint that must be balanced, just like performance, weight, time, expense, etc. What I do like about it is it forces the team to develop a broader set of base skills so that more of the team gets involved in the time consuming parts of the robot's design and construction.

Thanks for all your thoughtful comments so far! Keep them coming.

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

To me, it sounds like the other extracurricular activities got wind that the robotics team wasn't being regulated and complained to the administration. At least, that sounds like the way it would go down in my school if there was a hour restriction on extracurriculars. But that's a pessimistic view.

Being optimistic, its nice that the school is concerned that students are spending a lot of time. If "your team "forced" students to be there for unreasonable amounts of hours in order to be considered on the team" (which I'm definitely not saying your team does! I totally wouldn't believe that!) then having restrictions would be good. But the student can leave at any time -- they don't need some sort of policy to "back them up". Besides, so Jim Bob logs the total allotted XX hours already on monday or tuesday...now he has the whole rest of the week to go sit on his butt at home? So like almost everyone else has said, just thank the administration for their concern and try to reason with them using facts such as "students get their homework done before they come to robotics" or "every member on the team has at least a B-" or whatever can apply to your team -- and if the student is starting to do poorly, then its up to them to make the right decision to leave and go study, afterall, this is high school, right? As someone else said, schools need to stop holding student's hands with regards to everything.

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

When I was a student in the past I would put in 250-300 hours per build season, or 40-50+ hours a week. Many of us at that work output level sacrificed health and/or grades to do it.

This last season, as a coach, out team had more restricted hours including no work on Sundays, and the most dedicated students on our relatively small team put in a little under 200 hours. I think that a 200 hour limit is not unreasonable (admit it, your health and/or grades suffer at a 300hour/season work output).

A time cap will help you keep your sanity and work more effectively. How many of those 300 hours were high-productivity hours? A cut-back in hours might actually improve your teams overall productivity by allowing for things like relaxation, real meals, and sleep.

Good luck. :cool:

Edit: having read your mentor's post it seems as if the time cap won't severely impact your team's overall performance. I think you'll do just fine.

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

Then the caps are a good idea.

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

i am not sure where some of you are getting time spent.

Here is what I would consider a super MAXIMUM number of hours for six weeks...
I will state that this is TOO MUCH TIME to spend on any activity....

Five days a week 5 PM to 10 PM - 125 hours
Saturday 9 -9 12 hours - 72 hours
Sunday 9-9 12 hours - 72 hours

Max time 269 hours

This is pretty close to the 250 hour threshold.

i think this is really too much anyway....

Our schedule is 3 hours per night Monday through Thursday
and Saturday 9 to 4
This adds up to 114 hours per student...

We don't meet after school we meet each night from 6 until 9...
We sometimes add a Sunday or a Friday at the end of the season and occasionally we go until 10 the last 2 weeks.... this might add in another 40 hours or so .... but that is still something around 150 hours.


Those of you that are spending 300 hours plus...???? How do you do that?
The max schedule I have shown above is too much time.... it leaves no time for academics. or any other family life. If you figure that in six weeks the total time available is 1008 hours.... figure on sleeping at least 6 hours a night...252 hours 7 hours a day in school 210 hours.... 1. 5 hours a day to eat...110 hours...
1 hour per day for prep/shower/body functions..... 42 hours... this adds up to 614 hours... which leaves 394 hours...
If you spend 300 hours on robotics that leaves you exactly 94 hours for other things... or free/study/play time of 2.23 hours per day ...

of course you can cut out hours of sleep... but that will end up causing bigger problems...


I decided for our team that we would not come in on Sundays.... not for religious reasons but just to give everyone a day with the family and to get ready for classes for the next week...

We also have a "study table/ study hall" that goes from 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM every day we have a meeting during the week. This makes those normally unproductive hours immediately after school into a time that students can work academically. We do this as a team and studying together helps build a sense of team unity. At 5:00 many students eat together too... and then come back for the 6 oclock meeting. Every Wednesday parents provide a meal before the meeting and every Saturday a meal is brought in for lunch...

We meet in the evenings so we can get mentors to the meetings...

So I would be concerned as to what would count as hours at robotics?

For us we have a balance of somewhere around 150 hours of lab/shop/computer etc time directly devoted to team business... and we have another 40 hours or so of supervised study time...

Even after all of this that is less than 200 hours...

I don't think that schools need to institutionalize this however.... every team should figure out what is right for them... academics come first... I can't speak for family issues... but of course those must precede anything....

Our policy is if you can't maintain your grades you need to cut back until you do....

I am not sure what everyone is so worried about...

If you put in more than 250 hours of REAL time in robotics something is wrong...

I used to coach regular sports and a typical schedule would be about 3 hours a day in practice.
maybe 6 hours on Saturday....

this would give about 21 hours a week or 126 hours per six weeks....and that seemed like a lot!!


I am not sure how individual students can achieve more than 300 hours in the six weeks of build.
(I know it is a little more than 6 weeks ... 6 weeks and 2.5 days or so.... actually...)

that is averaging 50 hours a week... or over 7 hours per day working on the robot.

this seems to be extreme to me...

Re: Limits on Team Hours
 

I must heartily disagree. Why haven't the concerned faculty of the students whose grades have slipped contacted the parents?

Why aren't the parental responsibilities even mentioned here?

Why are we relying on the school faculty to make rules like this, rather than relying on good decision making and bringing the parents into the equation?

This is a 'hot button' issue for me, where instead of going the route of addressing the problem, a broad over-reaching general rule is put in place that could very likely affect people whom don't have an actual problem. I would MUCH rather set up a system where the faculty sends a letter home and to the mentor of the team letting them know of the issue so it can be handled individually.

For reference, we meet Monday for 4 hours, Wednesday for 4 hours, Thursday for 4 hours, and Saturday for 8. That's 20 hours a week for 5 or 6 weeks. Students are constantly reminded that if they have homework, that comes first, and we have a room next door where they can go DO their homework then come back to robotics when they've finished.