[KenWittlief]

Tton,
your post has me wondering how many adults you have on your team - and are they teachers, parents, engineers, people who work for your primary sponsor?

the idea of FIRST is to show HS students what engineering and science is like, so you might as well include team structure in that.

Engineering teams are not a democratic group. You have one person who is the lead engineer, or project engineer, by virture of his experience and skills and abilities and knowledge. All the major decisions are made by him (there will be discussions and the free exchange of ideas, but at some point, the lead engineer decides "this is what we are doing").

That one person delegates (assigns) responsibilities to other people. The other engineers have leeway and room for creativity to supply the thing the lead engineer has asked for, but they have to design and build that part as specified by the lead engineer. If an engineering project stopped and took a vote for every decision, nothing would ever get done (literally).

Fundraising should be the responsibility of the adults on the team. its their job to come up with money for registration fees, travel, parts, equipment, and to make sure the team has floorspace to hold meetings and work on the bot. the students might want to have A fundraiser to get money for team shirts or buttons or stuff like that

but if your team is ending up being run like a high school social club, then you are missing the whole point of FIRST.

Focus on the design cycle. You have six weeks to analyse the new game, plan your strategy, specify what you want your robot to be able to do, figure how how to design a robot to do those things, then build and test it. Put a week on each of those things and you have 6 weeks right there.

that means before the kickoff meeting you need to have people getting up to speed on how to program in C - how to hook up wires and pneumatics, how to draw a mechanical part so a machinist can fabricate it for you

and other things like your team logo, uniforms, buttons - that stuff should all be done BEFORE the kickoff meeting in January, so you can focus on bot during the 6 week 'competition' time.

I would say as a minimum, you should have an adult as lead project engineer, one as lead mechanical engineer, one as lead electrical engineer - and have students who shadow those key positions (they should really be taking over responsibilies as the 6 weeks progress)

If you try to listen to everyones ideas, and to make everyone happy you are going to end up with a kit of parts sitting infront of you on ship date, instead of a completed machine.

You can only build ONE design, you cant build everyones design, so accept that up front, let the leaders lead, and learn what its like to be a part of an engineering team (instead of being a member of a club).