[ngreen]

My best advice is to avoid making it a task and try making is something fun that they enjoy. Overplay being a team and underplay the robotics. Give them task that will produce accomplishments. I can not remember how many positive comments our team received from our i-movie and scrapbook last year. The persons who took on this responsibility were able to build something that got just as much praise as our robot.

It is about meeting a person's needs. You almost need a team phychologist to ensure people needs are met. We would but he would tell us all we were nuts (6 weeks of late nights and caffeniated beverages). I'm sure a lot of you have heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This goes from physiological needs: offer pizza and large amount of carbonated beverages, to safety needs: wear your safety glasses, don't jab people with sharp object, ie, "If you jab me one more time I'm not coming back." Hopefully you can meet the first two. The rest start getting harder.

Belonginess: This is definitely an issue. Make everyone on the team feel like they belong. To feel like you belong you must have a productive job on the team. If you sit around while everyone else does something you are not going to feel like you belong and going to think that robotics sucks. It is the mentors and students job to foster a sense of belonginess. If you see someone without a job, take them and teach them something new so they can belong.

Esteem: When people finish that long ardous job they want a little praise for it. It is human nature. That is why people should always post positive comments about people robots on here. People need that praise even if it comes with some improvement ideas. Another way to gain esteem goes with mastery of a skill. You can give a sense of belonginess and instill esteem by teaching someone something new. Think how awesome it feels when you learn or think of something new and you get positive feedback. This is meeting your esteem needs.

Self-actualization: This is the hard one to define and show how you can do it. More or less it means to get that person to be excited and addicted so that they want to do their best and then improve on it. A "To make the best better" kind of thing for you 4-H students out there. People who are self-actualize are the people that are excited to wake up in the morning, the one who will stay to 3 in the morning to finish a task, and who show up to meetings wanting to do as much as they can. It is hard to explain how to meet this need, but it starts by meeting all of the previous needs.

Okay. That was all I had to say. I hope you at least apply some of this to your team. It might not help to make more task but it will make every one of your team better. I'd say start with the physiological needs, yum.