[Donut]

Originally Posted by michael5402

I know it is hard on three of them but they knew what they signed up for.

Originally Posted by BrendanB

What did they sign up for?

This is probably something you want to understand first. Your mentors signed up to help inspire students through designing and building a robot. They did not sign up to spend x number of hours in the shop. They (likely) did not sign up to build a robot that is going to seed in the top 8 at a competition. This is especially true if you have newer mentors who have not done this before, every new teacher or mentor I have worked with has said "I didn't know this is what I was getting into" at some point during the first season.

Let me highlight some of my experiences and advice based on my time in FRC. I was a highly invested student for 4 years and now a mentor for 9 years with three different teams that have had different levels of mentor resources and approaches to work time.

On 498 we spent me as many hours as possible at the school to work on the robot, typically working 4-7 most weekdays and 8 - 4 on Saturdays. Schedules went longer the closer we got to end of build with some late nights and occasionally meeting on a Sunday as well. We had an abundance of mentors to work with students (sometimes a 1:1 ratio) but most could not arrive until 5 or 6 on weekdays. We were a fairly competitive team, always making eliminations, sometimes as a captain, but never winning an event. At the time I was a student I thought our meeting schedule was the only way to be competitive but in hindsight there was a lot of waste. Very little work happened from 4 until mentors arrived and if the mentor for your subteam couldn't come that day effectively no work happened. There was also not a sense of urgency much of the time because we knew we had time to work still. We never suffered much from mentor burnout (surprisingly) but we had a difficult time keeping teachers from the school (6 teacher leads in a 7 year span) at least partially because of the hours. We tried to have other teachers watch the team (babysit as some have mentioned) to help with the load but invariably the load falls on the lead teacher or two when the teams wants to start staying really late.

When I joined 167 I found out they "only" met three days a week most of build season; Tuesday and Thursday from about 5 - 8 and Saturday from 11 - 5. I thought it wasn't nearly enough time when I first heard it but after going through a few seasons of it it was pretty effective. Since there weren't as many meetings more mentors and students could make the ones there were and they were more effective as a result. We were also more focused on building when we were there, and tasks like buying parts and sketching out ideas usually occurred outside of meetings with meeting time only for final approval. As we became more competitive we tended to add a fourth meeting on Friday or Sunday in the last 2 or 3 weeks of build season and worked President's day but still stuck to avoiding meeting on every day. We did not have as many mentors as were on my previous team but still had 5-6 who regularly went to meetings each season and our lead engineering mentor was approved to open our build space without a teacher present. Our competitive level was about the same, we made eliminations at every event we were at and we were an alliance captain once in 2014.

I am the lead mentor now for 2662. We meet on a very low hour schedule, Tuesday and Thursday from 3 - 4:30 or 5 and Saturday from 8 - 2. We also meet for 10 to 12 hours on President's day and try to get in about 5 hours on MLK day. Outside of that we may get to add a Friday or Monday in the last week (still 3 - 4:30) but that is it. We have three mentors, I am the only engineering mentor and then there are two teachers at the school who help run the team. We have to meet on such a short basis out of necessity, not choice. Our teacher mentors both have young children and need to leave by 5 because of daycare or a spouse's job, and I cannot stay with the team if a teacher is not there. The majority of our students have to leave by 4 to catch buses since we accept students from a fairly wide geographic area, and many of our students live 20+ minutes away by car and do not have transportation home if they miss the bus. The build times for us do effect our competitiveness as we have difficulty finishing a basic robot in the time period we have (we missed elims and finished 15th at our regional last year, but largely due to strategy not scoring ability). However number of mentors has as big or a bigger impact overall. We still often have students who aren't working for part of meetings because they don't know how to do a task or don't know that a task needs to be done, and we have few mentors or experienced students to lead them.

Based on my experiences I think that meeting 3-4 days a week (3 - 4 hours weekdays and 6 - 8 hours on weekends) with extra time on holidays is the sweet spot for a team to be competitive and sustainable. Meeting more than this tends to burn out anyone who tries to attend all meetings and if you don't have an ample supply of mentors available then any extra time without enough mentors (or very experienced students) is usually not valuable. Highly competitive teams with ample mentor support or students who are skilled enough to effectively act as mentors are the exception, but that is not the majority of teams, and even then they can benefit from keeping their schedule "reasonable" to improve the long term sustainability and health of the team. I also think that getting approval for mentors who are not teachers to supervise the team at their build space is extremely helpful if it can be done; otherwise you need to have multiple teachers who can watch the team to hold an effective schedule.

TLDR; the problem is not mentors not being committed enough, the problem is not enough mentors/teachers. It is difficult to meet on a frequent enough basis to build a competitive robot if there are only 1 - 3 mentors on a team, and existing build time is likely not as productive as it could be due to the small quantity of mentors.