[Zuelu562]

Speaking to mentor burnout, 3623 is a relatively small team with slightly more mentors than students (the amount of mentors that worked on the robot is equal to the amount of students). Our schedule was "be there when you can, we'll be here Mon-Fri, 5:30-7:30, Saturday 9-3". One of our mechanical mentors could be there most of the week, but not weekends. The other mechanical mentor could only make Saturdays. Myself, the other electrical/programming mentor and another mentor could be there most days (I had to start missing Tuesdays due to my class schedule).

We were pretty toast after Bag. We were there for a total of 50-something hours that last weekend, and we bagged up a driving, scoring and hanging robot. We've determined that the schedule we used was really rough, and since we plan to expand the amount of students and mentors we have, we wanted to change our approach.

We're going to be implementing subteams, Mechanical, Programming/Electrical, and Spirit/Nontechnical. Certain subteams meet certain days of the week (Mechanical meets Mon and Wed, Programming meets Tues and Thurs, Spirit meets Friday), and everyone meets on Saturday. Students can ask a mentor to come in on an off-day for their subteam if they want to work on something and they can get to the club.

We chose this approach for several reasons. Some of our students can't get to the Boys and Girls Club on certain days, so this allows students to fulfill their "attendance" requirement while not being able to devote a full week, and allows those with vehicles or able to come to the club every day of the week to give what they want to. This also allows our mentors to not have to come in every day, but get very specific work done, and also gives us room to expand our schedule as necessary.

As a 6-year FIRSTer who has never won a regional or been to championships, I'm in favor of the 6 week deadline. It's a point of pride of the program, even if it's an illusion for some teams. We still work on parts, code, finishing things up like that, but I have never in my 6 years of FIRST took an entirely new mechanism to an event and installed it. The 6-week deadline may go truly the way of the dodo if/when the district system continues to proliferate, and I've started to question it since all events (sans-champs) went to Bag&Tag.

For now, let it live. Give teams direction, and the teams who want to do everything possible will do everything possible to get better.