A guide to high-functioning teams, what do you think?

[Siri]

Good start. Great work for only 1 season in! Thoughts:

Team Organization

• The "3 large time commitment" mentors need not be broken down as such. Many teams have design/mechanical & NEM splits, others are run by committee.
• If by "high functioning" you mean award-competitive, those "specialized mentors" (CAD and programming come to mind) as likely very, very, very busy. Often they're not separate from the 2-5 design engineers, either. You'll also see many lead CAD engineers that serve as lead mentors overall.
• 4 student leads and 20 students? More is ok too.
• Essentially, team layout is very flexible. There's no right way (for any of this)
• Parents = epic fundraisers
• Have NEMs.
• Have NEMs.
• What? oh yeah, have NEMS.

Technical

• Terminology note: AutoCAD is a specific CAD program made by Autodesk. Many teams nowadays use Inventor, SolidWorks, ProE, etc CAD software instead.
• Some teams swear by TIG welding. We MIG, not convinced it's necessarily best though.
• Mills rock.
• Don't see many 1" steel tube robots. (weight limit mostly) Al Angle & U-channel are perennial. Polycarb too. Feel free to get creative.

Pre-Season

• Something else to do in May-December: check out off-seasons! And make veteran friends.
• Pre-season task: plan and test how you're going to manage CAD & programming version control and integration.
• Pre-season task: figure out what your fabrication capabilities (equipment & experience) are. While 2 weeks of design & 2 weeks of testing is certainly advantageous if you can afford it, it'll make pretty big problems if you can't. Unfortunately, there aren't many Rookies that can.
• If you can, I'd go to a local kickoff rather than host the webcast yourself. (That friend-making thing again) Many kickoffs also have helpful workshops as well.

On-Season

• Strategy, 2 words: game simulation
• Design, 2 words: iterative prototyping. (alternatively: Team 148)
• There are some awesome design process presentations out there: examples.
• On that note, set design specs. Have margins.
• Don't underestimate the value of process--in anything.
• Holy-fast-CADing, Batman. Very often a bigger job than a few days in Week 2. Jeez, I'm going to have nightmares about that one. It does depend on your design team and what you expect out of your CAD though.
• Teams have very different philosophies on this, but I'll give you mine: try a Week 1 (or 2) event. Yes, field errors and rule changes are difficult, but everyone's on the same level thereabouts. More importantly, you've got quite some time to improve between then and say, a Week 5.
• Clean up in May? But how will I go to IRI? 1(ish) word: off-seasons.