How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol

[Bruceb]

I have been with team 706 for going on 10 years now. We have become increasingly more successful. This is partly due to learning how things best work on an FRC robot and putting in at least 25 hours a week during build season and nearly that many hours a week before our first competition.
I thought it would be nice for all of us to find out how many hours most teams put in per week of build season. I am not asking how many hours some individuals work but rather how many hours the team is allowed to work under team/school guidelines.
I did some searches and could not find a thread that addressed this in one place so here is a poll.
Thanks

[AllenGregoryIV]

We don't have any guidelines. It varies from student to student on our team. We had several students put in 70+ in week 1 of last year during prototyping. It tapers down after that but it stays above 40 hours for a least a few of them.

[Siri]

Also no universal guidelines. If you come every time the shop is open, you'd break 40 easily, particularly towards the end. A few people do that some weeks, but for most of us 40hr+, a good chunk is CAD or LabVIEW. (Plus a few students and a mentor spend significant time at a sponsor's shop.) The median is probably in the 25 +/- 5 range. That's 3 of the 5 nights at 3hrs and then the 8hr weekends, or the like.

[BigJ]

We are limited on how long the permits let us work in the scholl. The maximum we can do is about 4 hours a night on weekdays, and 8 hours on saturday. We sometimes eke a little bit of extra time out earlier and later than our meeting times here and there, so I'd say a maximum UPS workweek is 30-32 hours.

I am somewhat jealous but also relieved that we don't have an external shop with unlimited time

[Koko Ed]

We schedule 8 hours on Saturdays and three hours on Mondays with open extra hour the rest of the week except Fridays.

[sanddrag]

We're scheduled for 26 hours per week. It often ends up being at least 10 more than that. Toward the end, we had a week that was about 68 hours.

We had students that logged over 400 hours between November and March.

[Jim Zondag]

Team 33 schedules 22 hours per week with our students during the build season. Our leadership and core students will typically put in considerably more than this, I would estimate average at about 36 hours/week or so. This is time where we are actually together at our build site. There is also a lot of individual time put on doing things like CAD, software, Website, documentation, etc outside of the actual on-site work.
This works for us, I have found more time in the shop can be counter-productive, and we must balance planning/designing with building/testing.
Too much of one will hinder the other, and we have a small leadership group so we need to share time between these two domains.

[MechEng83]

1741 only schedules 24.5 hours per week [2.5 hours M-F, 8 Sat, 4 Sun], but there is often work going on for an extra hour M-Th, and a few more on Friday night, with Saturday and Sunday having more room for expansion. Because there's 2 Monday holidays in there, we usually have extra time in week 3 and the day before bag day. So I'm usually at the school 40+ hour during those 6 1/2 weeks, but we have kind of a bathtub shape average for time with a lot of hours in the first and last week.

[AcesPease]

Looking at the poll and then reading responses I wonder if the respondents who listed more than 30 hrs for the team really meant that a few core members work more than 30 hrs.

We schedule more than 20 hrs a week and a few people put in a lot extra, so I clicked less than 30 hrs.

[Bruceb]

The answer I was really trying to get to was how many hours is your work area/school open for working on the robot during build season. I realize some students will put in more than others. I am just looking for available time.
Thanks

[Bruceb]

rereading the poll question I realize it was not properly worded. However, in that light lets keep it going as is to see what we get.

[smclean1969]

When our team made it to the Championship event in 2012, I did an informal poll of teams around our pit area and it seemed that most teams were putting in 20-24 hours per week on official practice times. Obviously some are putting in substantially more hours and others less.

For what it's worth, I've built a rough estimation approach that can typically determine a team's performance. The number of hours put into prior to and during the build season are one of the primary factors indicating how successful a team will be. There's just no way for a team to be consistently successful without working very hard.

Now, teams with increased resources and better machining shops in particular can produce prototype and competition parts much, much faster than some other teams. This may save them a tremendous amount of time but most of them simply use that time to produce a better robot instead of taking the time off.

One thing I'd caution folks about too is losing all perspective on this. Don't let a robot competition become a higher priority than your grades. It doesn't do the students any good to win tournaments and not get into solid college programs. It doesn't do our sponsors any good if we're not producing future technical leaders at the expense of winning a tournament.

[Chris is me]

With the exception of an exam week during Week 3 (no scheduled classes so students build throughout the day), 2791 has in the past met Monday / Wednesday 3-8 PM and Tuesday / Thursday / Friday 3 - 5:00 PM. 16 hours a week. During crunch time we make Thursdays run until 8 PM for a 19 hour a week schedule.

Meeting on weekends is extremely unusual for us, excluding drive practice and the last weekend of build season (usually the same thing).

If you summed up our entire 2013 build season "in meeting" time, we met for around 120 hours. Lots of work was done outside of meeting times (mostly CAD / planning).

[Samwaldo]

Our official meeting times are
Monday - Friday 6pm-10pm.
But a teacher is there at 2 pm right after school and usually 2-4 students work on the robot starting at 2.

On Saturdays (and Sundays occasionally) 9/10am - 9am.

These are our favorite days because the mentors usually have had at least 3 dunkin donuts runs for coffee, and all the students have a few Mobile runs to get bottles of mountain dew.

Some of our funniest memories are from these 12hr meetings like when the wood shop decided to prank the metal shop. The wood shop mentors and students told a freshmen to go into the other room, and say that they were about to sand a battery so that it can fit in the battery holder. so the freshmen did this and even turned the sander on and slowly put the battery towards it. Not until the last second did somebody catch that was happened. Previously all that they had said was "be safe" "put your safety glasses on".

The long days are not only fun but there team bonding, and alot of work gets done.

[BBray_T1296]

Originally Posted by smclean1969

One thing I'd caution folks about too is losing all perspective on this. Don't let a robot competition become a higher priority than your grades. It doesn't do the students any good to win tournaments and not get into solid college programs. It doesn't do our sponsors any good if we're not producing future technical leaders at the expense of winning a tournament.

I would agree 100%. Every year my grades slipped in the spring because of FIRST, and although I was accepted into the university I wanted, I do wish I hadn't let that happen