Team Organization/Communication at Competition

[Wetzel]

I felt like 2914 was pretty loosey-goosey this year, but it is much easier to do that when you travel with only 9 students and 5 adults. Other teams I've been on have traveled with 30+ students and have had a much more formal trip process, assigning groups of students to a specific chaperone with designated check in times.

We plan a schedule before we leave, but also have daily meetings to remind everyone of the schedule, as well as to have status updates of everything that is going on. Typically, we can get a meeting room at a hotel with our room block for an hour or two Thursday and Friday night.

For students traveling to and from the event, our team is pretty lax. As a DC public school, all our students take public transportation to and from school and the teachers are comfortable with the students going out to get food in pairs, they just check in at the pit before they go. In the morning, we had two groups, the pit team and everyone else. Pit met in the hotel lobby and left as a group to arrive in time for the pit opening, everyone else was typically 30 minutes later. At CMP, we pre-ordered food and then had a team lunch behind the pits, where the crates were stored. Knowing food is going to be provided is a very strong carrot to get people to show up at a place and time.

For travel, every student was responsible to show up at the DC regional, it is on Metro and we didn't see a reason for the kids to travel to the school and then to the event. For VCU and CMP this year, we met at the school and took a charter bus to the event. We made sure we had phone numbers for everyone and the proper and separate count of students and adults, made a count before leaving any rest stop.

NEMO also has a short whitepaper with travel tips! You can find it here: http://www.firstnemo.org/resources.htm

Wetzel

[Gray Adams]

Our team is generally pretty open concerning daytime activities. On trips where we only send a fraction of the team (12 students, 2 mentors), it's pretty simple to plan on the fly. There's always food close enough to the event center for lunch for those not in pit/drive team, and the people that do go out bring back food for the others. We meet together for the award ceremonies or pit closing, decide if we want to go out as a group or splinter into smaller groups, set a time to be back in the hotel, and scatter. Room checks occur at some decided time.

The full team events are a bit more organized. Things are much the same during the day. Just stay with one or more other people, answer your phone when someone calls, and use good judgement. All students are assigned to a chaperon who they're supposed to tell their plans to in the evening. We have team meetings at some time after everyone should be back from dinner, and room checks a bit later. Sometimes we do full group activities, but unless it's pre-planned it becomes difficult to get 60 people all in the same restaurant.

I guess this only works if you can trust your team to go do things on their own. Our team is mostly juniors and seniors, with some sophomores, and everyone knows they can't walk off by themselves, so things seem to work out. Nobody lets anyone walk around by themselves, and we haven't had any incidents in a while.