[marccenter]

Dear CD,

Kickoff (4 hours) and Kettering Day after Kickoff (10 hours) plus 88 hours of shop time at school == 102 total possible hours per student by bag day.

We have two coaches that split weekdays Mon- Tues from 6 to 9 and Wed -Thurs 6 to 9 pm. Saturdays are 9 am to 3 pm. No meetings on Friday (date night) and Sunday (church and family day).

During the first few weeks of the season we typically meet only 2 hours for week days and 3 hours on Saturdays until parts arrive and the design is mature enough to keep working on.

This year we took four weeks to complete the running chassis, a full two weeks longer than past years which required small changes to KOP chassis.

We began using a computer log on system this year for the students. The system was not perfect but we logged 773 hours for 20 students or about 40 hours average shop time per student. Adding the MEZ kickoff and Kettering Day After Kickoff we log nearly 1000 student hours for two teams of 10 students for two robots.

This year Royal RoboRavens1 (1188) and RoboRavens2 (3548) completed both robots and a third practice robot that is incomplete.

Due to our lower time quantity (via typical student commitment) we target building a robust, minimum competitive robot (no shooter, no hanging mechanism) and find that we can usually meet that objective (One of my sayings in the workshop is that time is our enemy and we need to finish early to allow programming time and drive team practice).

One of our mentors spent nearly 100% of his time with a few students building all the wooden game field pieces.

My hat is off to all students and mentors who can commit to having more hours in the build period to work on your robot.

Personally my wife finds my commitment very disruptive to our relationship so using more time for the robot team is not practical. I am very happy that the RoboRavens#1 (1188) coach and I build together allowing us to make both of our work and personal issues more manageable.