Hours worked

[hardcopi]

Any other teams keeping track of total hours worked for the season? We have the kids and mentors punch in and out. They need 100 hours to qualify for a Varsity letter. (among other requirements)

Just checked and our team so far this season has clocked a combined total of 68 days and 59 minutes of work. I know there are kids who don't bother punching in too.

Curious how it compares with everyone else.

Rich.

[Joseph Smith]

When I was a student and we had a very small team, I would average about 36 hours a week, including weekends, and often more then that towards bag day. Now the most active members and mentors on our team probably do north of 30 hours a week.

[MrJohnston]

We aren't tracking them that closely, but... We have taken two days off since kick-off... Everybody put in about 25 hours kickoff weekend. Since then, we have had the shop up and running from 5-9PM every day except Saturdays and Sundays. Saturdays, we've gone from 9AM-5PM. We've taken the last two Sundays off.... So that's 97 hours of "stuff" going on so far. We've had anywhere from 15-90 kids and 1-15 mentors present at any given time.

Then, there are the hours that folks spend at home..........

[hardcopi]

<cough>... did you say 90?

[MrJohnston]

Yeah.... And we shrunk this year....
We've had as many as 140 kids on our time over the last couple years... We'd be close to that again this year, but we share a lot of kids with the marching band. The band changed their meeting days to correspond with our training - and made attendance part of their grade... So we lost most of our band kids.

We'd like to split into two (or four??) different teams, but can only get one work space.

[hardcopi]

We have 20-30 kids at any given time and finding jobs for them all can be difficult. My heart goes out to you trying to corral that many and keep them organized.

[Jon Stratis]

We do track team member attendance, but I don't have the numbers available here.

I do know my personal attendance though, I record it for work... So far this calendar year, 78 hours of volunteer time total! That includes team meetings, regional planning committee work, and LRI Training in NH. It also explains why I'm so tired every January and February...

[Ginger Power]

I don't know team hours but I do have some pretty crazy personal hours! If you count doing Ri3D that's 72 hours minus 5 for sleeping. Currently mentoring 3 different teams (4607, 4818, 4320) depending on whether I'm at college or at home. Every Saturday I put in 12 hours at home. During the week it's been sporadic but averaging around 12 hours a week. So added up that's around 103 hours give or take. Of course that doesn't account for time spent CADing and doing other miscellaneous robotics tasks in my free time. It definitely doesn't include the time I spend on Chief Delphi! I would be scared to look at those numbers.

[mrnoble]

Our team has 27 scheduled hours of work each week during the build season. That doesn't include work that CAD students are doing at home, or supply runs, or Google Hangout strategy sessions on Sunday. If we average 15 students (though often its more like 25), that is around 1200 person-hours of work done on the robot so far this build season.

[angelah]

Last year we went to signing in and out, but never did much with the data. This year we are tracking it as part of eligibility for positions at competitions.

We have 13 students, and they have clocked 545 hours (since the Monday after Kickoff) before we started our long Saturday today. Individual students range from 8 to 30 hours per week.

[PowerfulKitty]

We don't have any logging system, but I know we have logged a lot of hours because our team has been running as a class for the first 3 weeks of the build season. Between first and second semester, our school has J-term, which allows us to make robotics a day-long class. It has given us tons of time and a great headstart in this first 3 weeks. Sadly now we are back to regular classes and meeting after school going into build week 4.

[MrJohnston]

It's really not that bad... The toughest years were the three over which we grew from 30 to 140.... We struggled to create enough bureaucracy fast enough to keep it organized... We have very separate teams for programming, CAD, systems, mechanical, business and marketing... We are building two identical robots (competition and practice) plus repair older robots - until we desperately cannibalize them for parts (after which we fix them again)- so that we can keep multiple kids practicing driving at the same time.... Our elected VP's are responsible for setting up schedules for the kids in their subgroups and are encouraged to find smaller leadership opportunities for other veterans.. Our outreach efforts have gone through the roof... And, this year, we are trying to get a dance team going...

Frankly, I could not do it without all our mentors. I largely act as a CEO and delegate most of the work to our mentors - letting them run with things.

But, yes, there are times it can be hard to keep all the kids busy.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Team stuff... hmm, I think I'm just under 20 hours total. Not counting the commute.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

We have 70 students registered this year. We must take attendance as the team is a class in our district. We limit students to certain days so we don't have a bunch sitting around and doing nothing. I would not be surprised for our regular students to be at at least 16 hours each per week. As for myself, a few years ago I started adding up hours and quit counting at 800 for the year. This week I will have logged 24 hours by the end of tomorrow's FTC Tournament not including Inspector work.

[ElvisMom]

We've tracked time for a number of years, not meeting the minimum cutoff means the team won't pay for you to attend competitions.

With respect to tracking mentor hours, we do ask our mentors, alums (both student and parent) and parents to login when they are working too. This allows us to demonstrate in real numbers the amount of support the team has beyond the students to our school board, community, sponsors.

Two of our former team members built a custom time clock for us right before kickoff. We had been using a COTS app meant for employees. The new lets users check their own hours from the clock console - so no excuse for "not knowing where they stood" the day before we leave for competition.

It also has a text feature that lets mentors send a "shop open" or "shop closing early" message. My favorite part is when mentors are logged in "shop is open" message is added to the team website and when they clock out it says "shop is closed" so kids and parents can just check the website to see if someone is there before they stop by.