[ToddF]

We just went through a pretty bad experience with team building exercises. Here are some of the lessons learned:
- Team building exercises appeal to socially minded, extroverted personality types. Be mindful that there introverts on your team for whom team building exercises are torture.
- Make them opt-in, not mandatory.
- If possible, make them as relevant and applicable to robotics as possible. For example, if you are doing design challenges, make the challenge to design something which can be used as a subsystem of your robot.
- If the students participate, then the mentors do, too. If it's not valuable enough for full mentor participation, it's not valuable for the students, either.


Essentially, do everything you can to avoid requiring students to participate in something they view as a waste of their time.