Quote:
Originally Posted by DaveL
Does aiming to be a team and being more restrictive from the beginning help you compete and be able to deliver a more technical student education?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Caleb Sykes
Just curious, what would the focus be on, if not constructing a robot?
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Being in FIRST and putting the focus on the robot is like building a robot and putting the focus on the bandsaw (or mill or lathe, or whatever you do your machining with). The robot is a tool we use to play the game, the game is a tool we use to inspire and teach.
Even when we did not have so many applicants that we could not have them all in the spaces at one time, we were definitely on the "team" side of the balance. There are three main reasons for this:
- These days, STEM is all about working in teams. Anyone going into STEM who has not learned how to work as a team member is at a definite disadvantage.
- Our school's culture (and administration) is big on competition. Being a team rather than a club helps bring in new members, and definitely helps when the administration decides whether or not to support us with a parking lot for a practice area or a portable building for build space.
- Teams become "family", that is, learn to trust each other, far faster and usually deeper than clubs. Many of the kids we hope to inspire need to know what a family is supposed to be like. It's rather strange to think of FRC as an alternative to joining a gang, but there are a couple of cases where we may have made that big a difference in a life.
Our first three years, we never turned anyone away from the team, but we always set expectations, and awarded positions of leadership, responsibility, and prestige to those who deliver on those expectations. Team leadership is recognized and formalized, rather than elected. We have never held a truly democratic election on anything important; consensus is preferred, but when consensus fails, leadership determines the best course of action. The only time Jesse's decision on team leadership was overridden by the students was rather curious. The students as a strong consensus (next stage would have been pitchforks, torches, and power tools) told Jesse that Joey (his son) was definitely a team captain. He had dismissed Joey, afraid of nepotism complaints. After the intervention, all returned to "normal".
Last year and this year, we had more candidates than our spaces could hold, so we held "tryouts" to determine early who is willing to commit to the team. Our criteria are based on attitude, not aptitude, though we do get good aptitude data as a side effect which helps place team members in their respective roles. Our tryouts are intentionally sufficiently brutal that significantly more candidates "fail to complete tryouts" than are "not selected" from those who finish. Tryouts are
not as brutal as build season; the idea is to let kids flake out earlier rather than later. These cuts helped our team form an espirit de corps much earlier than ever before. This year, it's even higher, even earlier.
Finally, a personal note. In high school, I was a member of quite a few "clubs" and "activities" including National Honor Society, Mu Alpha Theta, yearbook, newspaper, and more, but the extracurricular I remember most was competing in "
Academic Games". Even though we competed as individuals, the experience of training together and cheering each other on when one of us was in the "playoff rounds" made those people constitute most of those whom I would be looking for at a high school class reunion. I ended up carpooling to college (commuting to the University of New Orleans) with three AG team members who had graduated a year ahead of me. Teams matter in ways that clubs cannot.