[laurenlacy]

In my experience the ways you can add more students is simply by expanding those programs you mentioned... our rookie year we had about one person doing programming, I know there is now a whole programming team that works on a bunch of different coding projects and toys around with different ideas. By breaking the building down into functional subgroups with a subgroup leader, and having the subgroup leaders work together to make sure the robot can integrate well you can also allow more students to feel "functional" in building the robot. This also means you have a larger group of students who know one part of the robot really well, which is good for troubleshooting.

As a team captain, you will need to work with your team to decide how to work with students who "just want to try one more thing". That is a great question to ask a mentor... situations will continue to come up in your life where someone will "just want to try one more thing" and your mentors probably have lots of great ideas for how to handle the situation.

Another way to work things is to have a "non robot construction" group for students who just really want to get their hands dirty. From building a crate to a mock up field (if you have the budget for this sort of thing), non robot construction can also be a blast.

I would also add that it seems you are missing an important "functional" group and that is the non technical side of things. While perhaps your intent was to draw attention to adding more students to the robot construction, FIRST is so much of the Inspiration and Recognition components, which in my experience don't always come from the robot. Another great way to add students to your team is to pursue avenues beyond building the robot, be it adding an animation team, pursuing the website award, and getting kids more involved with your corporate sponsors. Many large teams have half of the team or more dedicated to non-robot aspects of being a great team... finding innovative ways to reach their communities, working with FLL and TECH, working with corporate partners and finding new corporate partners.

Hope this helps.