Quote:
Originally Posted by Amy33Amy33
How do you guys prevent freshman from quitting right at the beginning of build season when meeting frequency increases, and how do you continue to benefit members who cannot meet every day of build season?
Also how do you schedule build season to still build the robot and prevent member burnout?
If you don't do this, how do you manage a culture of attendance where members come to meetings and multitask?
Do you divide the days that different sub-teams meet to increase focus (loud sub-teams on Mondays, quiet sub-teams on Thursdays?)
Do you have an attendance requirement for lettering, or an accomplishment requirement?
What has and hasn't worked for robotics scheduling during build season?
What secrets do you have for keeping on deadline?
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We are a smaller team (25 students) from a more rural community and this is generally how we operate:
1) We often times rotate freshmen (or just new members in general) around to different groups while seeing what interests them before they pick a sub-team to work with at a higher frequency. We've found allowing them to test everything out in the more intense environment that is created with build season helps them figure out what they have time to do and what interests them.
2) We schedule meetings for Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday each week but we work with the schedules of every student and will adjust meetings based on what needs to be done. Weekdays are 6 to 9 with Monday being required and Saturday is from 10-4 and is required as we do design reviews and have time to really dissect what we'd accomplished in a week.
3) We require at least 85% to 90% attendance for two straight years to get a letter and students can get honor cords if they are a 4 year active team member, specifically for Freshman through Senior year.
4) We've found that basketball and Robotics don't work well, but apart from that it's generally easy to work around other people's schedules.
5) We use design reviews to evaluate where we are compared to where we need to be in order to get through build, programming, and debug before we bag. They take place on Saturdays from 10 to 12 and we figure out from there what we have to do for the next week.