[Ken Leung]

Thanks for replying guys. Seems like every team have different policies depending on their situations. Some have very few members that they have to have everyone remain on the team... Some have lots of people interested that its not possible to allow everyone on the team.

From my past experience and from what I saw at other teams... Having a policy on students means some sort of discipline system where you award the hard workers and punish the slackers. It’s useful in the way that you are making sure your team is as productive as possible. It creative an incentive for students to work hard, and it stop slackers from staying around distracting people. Its just good practice when you are taking the job of running a team seriously, and at that point, it changed from being a club of students into more of a class like structure.

And then there are different situations where the robotics teams ARE classes in school, and so the teacher have to some how figure out a way to give grades to the students. Then, at that point, a policy is necessary.

Sometimes, when there is no main teacher on the team, and the team is more club orientated, it is hard to implement a policy, because some of the people won’t like it just because they don’t do as much. As a result, they won’t agree with what the team decided to do, and cause more troubles then before, maybe even split off and form another team. It’s a very tricky thing… Especially for rookie teams who are still forming the way their team would function.


Speaking of which, how do you guys determine if a student is hard working or not? Do you give tests to the students? Do you hand out assignments? Do you have projects which you would grade after everyone is finished?