[Burmeister #279]

Relative team size: ~15 students, ~10 mentors, several parents, ~3 graduates

Mentor Involvement: varies from time to time. our mentors prefer to let the students work by guidance.

School Involvement: we've been forced to move into our school this year. we have a lab with lathes/mills and a prototyping cnc that we are allowed to use, as well as CAD software and other computer stuff.

Access to resources: varies, obviously the above plus our sponsor, DANA, occasionally lets us use their 'real' cnc [3'x3'x5' ish work area]

Student motivation: all of the current students were convinced to join for various reason and almost all (actually all but 1) are still on because they enjoy the program. Its fun, simply.

Travel: students must have 60 build hours in, all of which are scheduled for 'normal' meetings, however, multiple students have amassed over 100 hours in the build season and in '04 one student pulled ~150 hours and it has to be signed by the mentor the student worked with. during the trip, every 4 students has to have a chaparone outside of the competition area unless they have been specifically told to go somewhere or do something, (then -->) in addition we have a buddy system which means during the competiton and at the hotel, each person needs to have a buddy if they leave their room/area.

funding: the team gets funding mostly from DANA <sponsor> and the school however students are required to pay $400 each season to travel and offset expenses. parents acting as chaparones do not have to pay for their room but extra parents pay 100 for their room

suggestions for your team, since you are traveling overseas is definately have chaparones for your students, not to 'baby' them, but to keep them safe and out of trouble, and require certain work-hours to travel/compete with the team. also, as far as motivation goes, tell incoming students that they "have the opportunity to lead your award-winning team to another great season" it usually works and its completely true =) I think i missed this up top, but our team is organized into subgroups: drive/base, GameObjective/manipulator, programming/electronics, and several students that 'gopher' in between sub-teams whenever needed (they also do the website). a mentor and a student co-lead the sub-team. in order to keep the students involved in design, one of the things we do is require every student to watch the game video and come in the next meeting with a possible design which could potentially be used. sorry for the rambling style here but i'll prolly add more later. good luck =)