[JesseK]

The way we've addressed and (kinda, but not fully) solved the student engagement problem is to setup a student leadership structure for the 60-ish FRC kids. The kids and the adults work together to run the team like a tech company, and the student leaders are responsible for making sure the peers in the respective groups have work to do. The leaders came up with an interesting 'lives' concept, where students gain/lose lives based upon attendance and critical work executed. With this system, it looks like we're going to lose a few kids before the build season even starts if they don't turn it around.

From there the adults teach, co-op in execution and mediate.

Unfortunately we've had to turn away some very motivated underclassmen, but there's so much available for them to do other than FRC in our program we try to find ways to keep them interested longer-term. Some of them just show up during build season anyways, which then becomes a source of contention (seriously, there's only so much space, peer-helping-while-producing and mentor attention span). We've addressed this historically by allowing them to be in an observational role only, and then the next year they're fully-involved. Oh, and I almost forgot - the grants we wrote to get extra machinery (CNC, 3D printers) have provided an entirely new avenue to recruit mentors to teach students stuff in, so we were able to up the team capacity a bit over the last couple of years. Some of the CAM/CNC work is a bit repetitive (only CNC plates at the moment) but it gets them in the door and into the longer-term experience.