[Brandon Holley]

First of all,
Kudos to you for support FIRST, and for realizing how many kids the program CAN help.

Coming through FIRST as a high schooler, and now having been a mentor for 4 years I can understand completely what you are going through.

I have always found student motivation to be a function of each individual team.

When I arrived at my current team, student motivation was not nearly like it was on my high school team. Students would do almost exactly what you describe. Come to the meeting just to hang out, not want to build or do anything that involved getting up. It was an unmotivated, almost lazy, atmosphere.

After a while we decided as a group of mentors that we needed to take some action. The action was to try and motivate the students we had by attending more off-season events, doing team activities that did not correlate to robotics necessarily (trips, movies, sports, picnics).

This filtered a lot of kids away from the team...by building a team image, and entity, we did lose some of the kids that were with the team originally. However, we were able to find a few key students that were genuinely interested in the team.

We then had these students find their friends, and their friends friends, and had them bring them to meetings. We held special meeting days designed for bringing your friends and introducing them to the teams.

This change started occurring around 3 years ago...we had a max back then of 5 dedicated students....were now in the range of 25-30 dedicated students.

The process is by no means going to be instant, it takes a lot of hard work, and what seems to be needless effort. The truth being students should WANT to participate in a program that is so beneficial to them, however many of them do not see that value.

If your company can continue to handle the financial investment, I would absolutely recommend staying on board. The rebuilding road is a long and bumpy one, and is one that can also fail from time to time. It takes dedicated mentorship to keep the team afloat, and it takes dedicated students to make it thrive.

Hope it helps,
Brando