Why Losers Lose?

[Rick TYler]

Originally Posted by bam-bam

(...)During the time at Boilermaker regional, our lowerclassmen had been visiting the campus- and I do mean the whole time. I can understand why- they feel that they weren't able to do anything contributing while the upperclassmen did all the work. (...) lowerclassmen had suggested ideas, but at some point they started feeling ignored and insignificant.

Student involvement has always been a problem for our team. (...)

I've heard this dozens of times over the last seven years -- there simply isn't enough STEM stuff to be done on a single robot to engage 20-30 students or more, so teams have to come up with non-STEM busywork such as PR, marketing or doing presentations. Organizations that find real robot-creation tasks for all their members don't have trouble engaging students. Our own club has had 50+ members for the last three years, but all of our students get to design, build, program, test and operate robots. No one has to be a cheerleader or "PR person." If you want to run a STEM-focused program, make sure everyone has a chance to engage in STEM activities.

As for the topic of the thread, I've found this really interesting, although a lot of the factors listed strike me as dependent variables, not independent. Like any business, the key to losing seems to be to have a poor plan or to fail in execution, or both.