Challenges of small teams with fewer than 10 students

[SenorZ]

Team 3677 is a second year team in a school of around 2800. Our team has about 10 active members. I attempted to recruit more at the beginning of the school year, but not having an FTC team or other "cool" things for the recruits to do, they slowly vanished.

Our approach is simple: everyone show up as much as you possibly can! This works for some students, who will be in my classroom after school almost everyday and Saturday's too. But others have sports practice, other clubs, even college classes that keep them out of the build room. When those students come by their 1 day out of the week, they are lost and have to catch up on a lot. This is VERY stressful for me.

I like your idea of knowing your limits, and going for the best niche robot you can build with the personnel available. If we had done that we would have been done by week 3, but instead our (my) lofty ambitions caused multiple delays and rebuilds of some robot parts.

One last recommendation: CAD! NONE of my students know how to CAD because I don't. We have one former student who stopped by occasionally and did some CAD work for us, but otherwise we had a poorly organized plan of what the robot would look like when it was done.