Quote:
Originally Posted by Whippet
(Also, don't forget that by week 2, 25-50% of the team will have decided that it's too hard and will "leave" until competition.)
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Fixed that for you. (Back in the olden days of Nationals at Disney World, this was a bit of an issue for some teams--apparently, some folks joined just to get out of school and go to Disney for a few days--but I also seem to remember hearing that quite a few of such folks were hooked and didn't leave the school/shop for several weeks!)
In all seriousness, your job right now is to both retain and "weed". You want to retain as many students as possible, while weeding out the ones that are actually bad apples (NOT NECESSARILY the ones that are only in this for the college application!).
To that end, you have free labor, use it. Put in some shop organization time, some practice building time, encourage students to work hard at something productive while they're there (and clean up after they're done). I define something productive as "prototyping *random robot system*" and/or "shop organization/cleaning", but you may have other definitions, like "website construction" and "outreach activities so we have this same problem next year".
This has the side effect of giving a well-trained team when Kickoff rolls around and you actually build, but it primarily gives everybody a chance to see the time commitment and leave on their own, or become so engaged in the team that they're a contributing member of the team, all before build season. College application only? See if they regret not joining earlier. Here for the free food? Now's the time to teach TANSTAAFL and get them roped in to work--only if they want to work, of course, but "no work, no food" can work wonders.
Now, of course, if there are kids that are going to cause "drama", you'll also have a chance to see that and have the mentors take them to a corner of the build room for a little chat about stuff like this new-to-them idea of gracious professionalism and other such matters. Hopefully they get the general idea and stick around without the "drama". (Rather than the alternate chat of "here's the front door"...)