Quote:
Originally Posted by sciencenuetzel
2nd Question: How do these teams CONTINUE winning for so long? What kind of team culture do they promote and what practices do they use?[/b]
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I have one easy answer for you Mentors. Now before we enter the mentor vs. student designed war, that is not what I am talking about. Mentors on successful teams make their teams successful for a number of reasons.
1) Mentor consistency - teams at the top have multiple mentors who have been involved with the program for many years. Not only does this help to have a healthy program, but the internal knowledge base is huge (and often an overlooked) resource. Knowing that you will have the same base year to year makes it easy to stay at the top of your game.
2)Mentors who were on FIRST teams as students - some of the most successful teams have a stable of mentors that were also on teams themselves. This adds to the knowledge base, but when it comes to connecting with the students in meaningful ways it is hard to replace direct experience.
3)Mentor driven resources - Having a bunch of mentors can do loads for your team resources. The absolute BEST way to get significant sponsorship from companies is to have internal advocates. Engineering employees who work with the team are your biggest chance at securing the funds required to keep performing at that level
4)More mentors, More attention to detail - In order to succeed at the highest levels of FIRST you need people who can help focus on the details of the design. I am not saying they design each sub-system but it makes a big difference if you have 1-2 dedicated engineering mentors guiding students on each sub-system than just 1-2 guiding students on the whole robot.
5) Mentor Network - It is no secret that many of the top teams in FIRST are friends and even if it is not a formal collaboration, conversations between mentors happen during build season. Many of these friendships have been growing over many years driven by social events outside and in the evenings after events.
6) Mentor age - This one is not as important as some of the others, but on many of the "best" teams you will find young mentors. 22-30 is the sweet spot for getting mentor who can throw themselves into the team, without regard to life outside of robots. Typically young mentors (ie. Millennials) don't have families they are providing for, strict schedules they need to keep, etc. This is not to say that older mentors don't add alot of value to teams but we are strictly speaking about top teams right now.
When it comes to being a top team the easy way to look at it is you need people who are dedicated enough to the program to put the work and time in required to keep achieving at that high level.