What Contributes the Most to a Team's Success?

[SuburBot]

Dedicated students. More specifically, students WHO GET THE POINT OF FIRST.

I bet that the majority of people who didn't answer students are involved with a team that already has good students. If you were on a team without them, you might vote differently.

Because unless participating students are capable of wanting to learn, wanting to have fun, and wanting to help others do the same, nothing gets done. The final robot is something nobody learned from, built almost completely by mentors who are worried about having nothing to compete with. Enthusiastic mentors and students with ideas and motivation get tired of trying to get the majority of students to care about what they're trying to say. They also get tired of trying to design or build a robot or component while everyone else plays online video games, watches pirated movies, or play cards and board games. Some of the non-contributors become trolls, and tell dedicated and interested participants that their ideas suck while doing nothing themselves.

Being the majority, the lazy people and trolls stay. A very frustrated and fed up dedicated minority abandons all hope and stops showing up.

I'm unfortunately speaking from my experience this year and last year. Most interested and experienced mentors and some dedicated students have stopped showing showing up, and recently, I have too (although I will be at the regional competition on the last day to meet some successful teams).

I honestly don't know why most people on my team joined. Because they literally couldn't care less about Gracious Professionalism, the engineering experience, or anything else FIRST tries to promote. The only logical explanation for them being there is the school's free internet connection or that it would look good on their college application. And the only reason they were accepted into an remained on the team was because we needed to prove we had above a certain number of students to be sponsored this year, so there were no restrictions on joining or staying.

For the reasons described above, the robotics team isn't taken very seriously at all at my school, and students that should be the most interested in FRC don't join. It's a death spiral.

CONCLUSION: If you don't have enough students that want to learn, have fun, or participate, everyone who does will pack up and leave, and the team will implode. This is why an FRC team's rookie year is the most important. It sets the standard.