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Originally Posted by Bill Moore
This is the wrong fact to focus on. The true fact of focus should be the size of a team. If one team has 12 members, and another team has 36 members, over 6 weeks, the first team has 2/3 less labor hours than the second. Three hours at kickoff doesn't make a difference!!! It's all those extra work-hours that large teams have just due to their size that is the real problem. You should demand that FIRST reduce the size of the teams.
Once we get the time issue under control, we can go for weaning the organization off these big business and government hand-outs. That way, all teams have identical financial portfolios as well.
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HEH you would think that wouldn't you. Actually size has absolutely nothing to do with your work ability. It's all about organization and resources. Our team has 79 kids. Thats right 79 kids (and about 10 mentors not to mention we require
all the parents of the kids to participate) last I checked. Theoretically we should be able to build a horde of robots. OK now picture 79 kids and most of them want to build drive trains, not happening. You start having to assign people jobs and leadership becomes uber important because if kids have nothing to do they sit around and talk, this has a magnet effect on surrounding kids. Also consider that all we have access to is a wood shop. Its very hard to do work and this year we've been forced to take a modular approach to the robot where each group builds one thing and has four weeks then at the end we combine our projects into a single robot. We've found our size makes us unwieldy and it's much easier to manage smaller groups. My point is that yes a large team can do everything they want and do it well.... provided that they are very organized and have access to the tools. The one nice thing we've found about being big is that if you require kids to fundraise a certain amount of money, $100 say, you can virtually pay for a good section of the robot... assuming you can get the majority of the kids to fundraise.
