What portions of the Agile/Scrum development process are you looking at implementing ? We have experimented with Agile and the way the team works before, but have not had a great deal of commitment on everyone's part to keep to a defined process. We have had students take the lead on some of these processes and manage the team. Maybe avoid the sprints and estimation focus of Agile. You could work with the product owner concept (assign someone who has the vision for the robot design). Here are a few Agile concepts you could focus on.
1) Daily Stand Up has advantages in that all the students (and mentors) are aware of what is being worked on and who needs help.
- These are short (set a time limit of 10-15 min)
- Team members are talking to each other on what they have done
- Allows for others to volunteer to help out those that are having issues
- NOT design discussions which risks keeping this short
- These are short (set a time limit of 10-15 min)
2) Make the work visible
You can use a physical board with sticky notes with categories such as Backlog, Work in Progress, Blocked, Completed (work off this in your daily stand up)
You can duplicate that board with an electronic version for viewing outside the working sessions / remotely.
By making the work visible you allow people keep the status of the work up to date, the team has awareness of what others are working on they might not otherwise have visibility to and allows those who have an interest in an on-going task to offer to help out.
3) Continuous Improvement
Meet once a week to discuss what is working and what is not working as far as your robot design and development "process" (not the robot design itself, but the way your team is working). These are called retrospectives and there are hundreds of different games and tools that you can use to have some fun and improve the way the team works. Get feedback from everyone. Define an action plan to change the way the team works to improve and become more efficient.
http://www.plans-for-retrospectives.com
Some tools:
JIRA is an Agile tool we have used in the past, Atlassian provides a free license for community/non-profit orgs.
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
Something a little more simple and Kanban focused you could use would be Trello
https://trello.com/