[Allison K]

Myself and a few of the older students from 226 have talked about this a little bit. We were trying to figure out how to solve the issue of too many students on the team (there were 61 students on 226 this year), and there not being enough work for everyone to do. No, let me rephrase that, there was plenty of work to do, but not the fun kind. So many people signed up that some that wanted to be on the build team had to be shifted to Spirit, Management, Digital, Etc. It seemed like a lot of them quit because they weren't having any fun. We figured that 226 probably has a large enough budget to support two teams, but it would be pretty tight. Between all of the stuff mentioned earlier, and the fact that upper leadership would never go for the idea, and the money issue, we decided that it wouldn't work, and we'll have to figure out some other way to allow more kids to participate. We considered maybe still being one team but building two robots, and having two build teams. Not two identical robots, two different ones. One build team would be made up of the veteran members, and they would build the competition bot, and the second team would be the new members and they could build a practice bot to learn how to do things. Then the first team could "mentor" the second, and the engineers could help everybody. Then there would still only be one registration fee, and if the team won, everybody (well not everybody, but as many as possible taking into account funding and hours worked, etc.) could travel to nationals. We have yet to bring this up with higher leadership.

Allison