[prismiko]

Our team is currently at a middle stage - not rookie but still far from the established older teams. We are happy to grow a little bit every year. I am a second year mentor and actually got some good tips from other mentors at the mentor training back in the fall.

This year, for example, we've tried to formalize/emphasize a little more:
- define roles and responsibilities - regardless of who does it, there are certain tasks which need to be done. If you have a small team, people will have to wear multiple hats. If you have small tasks, it would be easier to assign to kids that are there that day.
- project planning - we asked student team leads to break down to task level and track them on Trello. Note that it worked very well for our programming team but not the others (but only because they didn't do the exercise and not all the mentors were able to follow up).
- project management - we tried to have catch up/ stand up meetings for the first few minutes of each session so that everybody knows what they're doing. The kids may need to be reminded to do this until it becomes routine.
- communication - someone from each team sends out an email summarizing progress for the day and where they left off/tomorrow's work
- design - we tried discussing design ideas during sessions and over emails - we don't have CAD yet (that's for next year).
- We planned to finish our robot a few days before bagging and have our drive team tryouts/practice. We were able to hold tryouts an hour before bagging and found our best driver. Our programming team had prepared a cheat sheet which showed the commands/buttons for the robot that anybody who wanted to try out can look at. This was an improvement over last year considering our first practice was at regionals.
- programming - we got GitHub integrated; we developed code using pair programming so that each of our 2 programmers served as the backup for the other. We converted to the Command-based model in Java - it was easier to move forward once the template was established.
- we changed the meeting hours slightly to accommodate the mentors - we had support from our teachers who have to be there to supervise in the school building.

If your students only have a 2 year span, you'll need to get some mentors that will commit to more than 2 years. Once you find a process that works, you'll need the mentors to enforce and teach the students that process.

There were a good several weeks where we lost momentum - students on our team are involved with many other activities at school, they had finals, we had the snowstorms, sometimes we couldn't get the hours needed at school to finish building, etc. We're still struggling with that and how to keep the team engaged during the off season. I send them emails with interesting stuff from CD, FIRST updates, robotics related articles, etc. since I know most of them were not regularly reading these sites.

There are definitely many other areas we need to develop but we found that too much change is difficult to make stick. Besides, from what I've read on other threads, it's taken years for the older teams to get to where they are now. You should discuss with your fellow mentors on the team and agree on a list of goals for 2014.

Hope this helps!