[Jeff Waegelin]

Here's my answers:

How often do you guys meet during build season?
Every day after school, and most Saturdays.

For how long?
A LONG time.

How long do you design for?
Too long. We spend a lot of time on design, and usually end up rushing to get finished. Design is good, but don't spend so long on design that you forget to build a robot.

Do you build a prototype?
No. Sometimes we do mock-ups of individual components, but we don't prototype everything as a whole.

Does the whole team get to see kickoff?
Yes. In the past we watched it on TV in the school library, but this year, we went to the regional kickoff in Novi.

Is there some big kickoff meeting that everyone gets together for?
We meet the day after kickoff to brainstorm ideas for what we want the robot to do and how we want to do it. Everyone comes up with ideas until they are out of them, and then we work to refine them.

Where do you build?
Most years, we use our school auto shop, but this year, due to renovation at our school, we met in a middle school wood shop across the street, our teacher's classroom, and a back room at the local Visteon office.

Do you organize your meetings around your engineer's schedule?
We don't really have engineers, just a teacher and parents. Our teacher usually can meet any time, but when he can't, we usually schedule around that.

Are there subsections on your team (arm team, claw team, drivetrain team, electrical team), or does the team handle all of it?
Our team is small enough that we can't really split into exclusive groups. We have designated electronics, pneumatics, and programming people, but most of the work is shared among the whole team.

Does everyone on the team automatically get to go to Regionals and Nationals?
In order to go to regionals and nationals, teammembers have to demonstrate commitment to the team, as determined by our 2 adult team leaders. That basically means they have to show up and work, fundraise, and so forth. This year, since we hadn't pre-qualified for Nationals, we were buying plane tickets knowing who was selected, so everyone who went to regionals got to go, but last year, we already had tickets and had to choose people based on how many tickets we had, so the requirements were tougher.

How do you determine who is driver, secondary, human player?
The drivers were determined ahead of time. We do a local off-season league called OCCRA, and our drivers had done well there, and were allowed to drive for FIRST, too. I was selected as the coach, because I was a second-year member, knew the game well, and wanted the job. The human player was selected in a tryout of sorts on Thursday at our first regional.

I hope those answers were helpful to you.