[GreyingJay]

You are spending an awful lot of time in the shop. Yet you mention last-minute robot building and having poor-to-mixed track record because of it. So, what is everyone doing during all these hours in the shop?

When you break it down, there's logically one of two things happening here:

1. You are building a fairly complex robot that takes many hours to design, fab, put together, test, program, etc. Everyone is working at their hardest and still consuming every available hour.

Options: (a) reduce the complexity of your robot, (b) acknowledge that you really do need a ton of hours to do this and plan them accordingly. Option (c) is get more students involved, but as any project manager knows, this is not as easy. (This is known as the Mythical Man-Month)

2. You're spending a lot of hours in the shop but not using them productively, leading to wasted time and last minute rushing. If you could fix this, you'd spend less wasted time and therefore less time overall, and perhaps achieve something closer to the build schedule your mentors planned. Of course, "if you could fix this" is a lot easier to type than it is to do...

Options: (a) take a more disciplined approach to building, divide the work into discrete chunks, do whatever project planning exercises work for you to be more organized and work more efficiently, or you could always (b) reduce the complexity of your robot.