List of specialist jobs for pre-season

[Unicorn_Knight]

Let me just say I feel like all of those small teams are at a terrible disadvantage having to compete with these huge teams you mentioned.

However, looking at your specialist list, I find it a little funny that my small team of 14 has something extremely similar to it. For all of those tiny teams out there trying to organize themselves, here's an example of how we function:

• Administrative Student (in charge of extra fundraising, recruiting, basically organizing anything that needs to be organized. This job should be two students, but it can be managed by one if neccessary.)

• Creative Student (in charge of designing t-shirts, hoodies, buttons, etc.)

• Head Scout

• Chairman's Award Crew (Usually two students)

• Programming Captain

• Mechanical Captain (doubles as Pit Boss)

• Electrical Captain

All of those jobs are designated to 6 of our upperclassmen, while the underclassmen are each assigned to those girls to learn from them and eventually take over their jobs when they graduate. This system is extremely new, but it's proved to be successful.

My only further comment would be that the Administrative responsibilites should really be divided. Originally we had our two student founders each take on a section of that, but last year the job somehow became combined when they graduated.

[OSU_Springer]

Our team (677 - Murphy's Outlaws) runs somewhat similar to those already mentioned. We actually have two teams, one of mentors and one of students. This is done due to the HS students being mentored by a Ohio State collegiate group. We have the following structure:

Team Leads (College & HS) - Usually 2-3 people from both groups, responsible for all administrative tasks and keeping people on task. College leads make final decisions on design when subteams need advice or can not come to a conclusion.

CDTs (Component Design Teams) - Both College mentors and HS students broken down to these sub-teams. Each sub-team has its own lead person (both collegiate and HS).

Chassis - Responsible for designing and building the chassis and drivetrain
Hardware- Responsible for all electrical and pneumatic components
Software - Responsible for writing and testing all software/code
Mechanism - Responsible for the design and construction of the game manipulator(s)

We also have other sub-teams that borrow people occasionally from these aforementioned CDTs for Awards, PR, Business (Marketing), etc.

Our team typically numbers 30-40 girls and 10-15 mentors. We typically build two robots (one for practice) and two mechanisms. The team comes a conclusion in the last week of build to determine which mechanism will be the competition version, and be shipped with the 'bot.

Our biggest problem is knowledge retention, since every year we lose mentors (college kids do eventually graduate and move on to real jobs) and HS seniors graduating.