[Jaine Perotti]

Not in order:

1) Scouts
2) Public Relations/Fundraising
3) Team organizers (student or adult)
4) Animators
5) Electrical design

In the past 5 years, I have worked with two different teams that have had most of their difficulties in these five areas.

The first area is scouting.

On my old team, the Who'sCTEKS, often there were simply not enough people there to scout. The same 4 people (this past year, alot of them were adult mentors, because the students already had jobs to do) were often the only ones scouting, for the whole entire day. This wasn't the result of disrespect/non-recognition of the scouting job - it was the result of the small size of the team.

On HAZE (1889), the team was also too small to divide the scouting load reasonably between members. Gary Dillard, his daughter April (who wasn't even on the team), and myself were the only ones providing scouting data for the team. I took my notes on just a plain lined notepad, and I scouted 4 different robots at once. Although I was able to come up with a pretty good way of keeping track of all of them, it shouldn't have been necessary. Hopefully, HAZE will work on recruiting more students next year, so the work can be more reasonably distributed.

Team organization, public relations, and fundraising are also areas in which my two teams experienced difficulty - mainly because of the size of the teams, as well as student motivation and too few adult mentors.

The Who'sCTEKS have actually come a long way in their fundraising capabilities, but lacks a core group of motivated students in charge of fundraising efforts. It appears that students do in fact go out to fundraise, but only after being endlessly hassled to do so by the adults (they almost couldn't attend the Championship). Again, I feel it is necessary to recruit more members, in order for the load to be lightened for each individual student, and also in the hopes that a student leader(s) could be found to take charge of the effort.

I also feel that this is the case with HAZE, although their fundraising crisis arose because there wasn't enough awareness of the problem initially, students lacked motivation, and there were few adults to spearhead the effort (poor Gary and Mr. Knauff were already trying to manage the design and construction of the robot, as well as deal with discipline problems, AND they had no prior experience with leading a fundraising effort. I don't blame them for not leading that effort too). I ended up designing and producing all of their sponsorship forms and brochures, as well as designing a team logo. That should have been a student's job, not mine - but there simply weren't any students interested in taking on the project.

I also feel that animators don't get as much recognition or attention as they deserve. For some reason, their job is often seen as less important than the jobs that are directly involved with the robot (fundraisers, organizers, and scouts also suffer this same fate). Overlooking or forgetting about the supposedly "less important" jobs is the number one reason why teams become dysfunctional. If you look at the "greats" - the teams who consistently have great robots year after year - you will discover that they almost always have exceptional strength in scouting, fundraising, animating, graphic design, recruiting, public relations, and outreach - as well as strength in numbers to cover all of these bases.

I also want to mention electrical design here, because of the overwhelming number of robots I've seen with messy, unplanned, and last-minute electrical designs. Although there has been improvement and innovation in this area in recent years, I think a majority of FIRST teams forget about how important it is to have neat, accessible wiring. HAZE was a prime example of this lack of foresight (no offense, Tytus - but you aren't an electrical designer!).

Although we didn't have any electrical problems that were a direct result of our wiring (I did neaten it up after the initial picture was posted here on ChiefDelphi), it was inaccessible and difficult to manage. When we did have electrical hardware problems at the Florida Regional, it became apparent that next time around, we needed to allow more space and have a better overall plan with regards to our electronics. I think the Who'sCTEKS also need to listen up to this too - although I also think this has gotten better in recent years for them.