[Ben Martin]

Our meetings start with a brief meeting in our lead teacher's classroom where the student and adult leaders outline to everyone what we are trying to accomplish that night. The student leaders hold a brief meeting, then everyone breaks into their respective subteams to work on whatever is necessary for that night.

Typically, mechanical, electrical, and programming students fill roles into whatever needs to be done, like design a robot cart or fix a mechanism on the previous year's robot. They go wherever they need to go, like the school's CAD lab our the machine shop. Public Relations stays in the classroom and makes plans for the business side of the team, and our information technology team typically stays with them and helps out where needed.

At the end of the meeting, everyone goes back to the classroom and talks about what they accomplished that day.

Basically, the more students you have, the more interesting projects can be worked on at the same time. It also gives some of the more experienced students some logistical experience balancing the talents and work efforts of the general membership.

For keeping students interested, I'm a big fan of project-based learning over tutorials--from personal experience in high school, it was very rewarding when I could point to a part of my team's robot and say "I helped design that." I remember much more from those experiences than any presentation I have ever been given.