[MrJohnston]

I agree that teams need to work on keeping their kids from crowding around the pit.... I have a team of nearly 100 students and can attest that it is possible - albeit difficult at times. (When the robot has an accident, for instance, kids naturally want to see for themselves what happened.) We do chase them away (back to the stands) telling them that a runner (usually me) will come to the stands with a full update as soon as the issue is diagnosed. In order to help with this we: Volunteer for every single job we can (safety goggles, FLL judge, field reset, etc.); Over-scout, assigning very specific tasks for students; formally organizing cheering. As there is no limit to the number of kids who can cheer at once, our students *always* have something to do.

We very much do encourage our kdis to visit everybody else's bit as it helps them to ask questions about the engineering behind other teams' robots and build communication skills - something that some of our more mathematically-minded kids can use to improve. It would be shameful to end this practice.

The biggest thing we need is a venue that can handle us. In Seattle on both Friday and Saturday, we had a problem in that the stands completely filled (aside from a few seats from which the field could not be seen), the aisle between the stands and the field became overly-crowded and there was not anywhere to go.