The Struggles of Bigger Teams

[efoote868]

At the start of each season (pre-build season), my team usually has a kickoff. Typically the team draws 60-70 at the start of the season, and dwindles to about 40-50 at the end. First thing (and imho the best) to do is to set expectations.


"I'm glad we have a large team this year, but realistically only 8 people can have their hands on the robot at any point in time, only 6 people can fit in the pits during competition, and only 4 people can be on the drive team.

If you expect that you're going to show up to a few meetings, goof off and not positively contribute to the team and then drive the robot, you need to rethink your expectations.

We expect you to behave as adults, and to figure out a way that you can contribute to the team. We're not here to babysit you, and during the build season we don't have enough time to find jobs for everyone as well as build a robot.

When it comes down to the end of the build season, don't feel offended if the people in charge brush you off or ask you to move. They'll be under incredible stress, and chances are they'll show it.

Having said that, we'll gladly help you learn roles on the team and we'll be even gladder if you can find roles on the team to fill."


After that you can describe the structure of the team, who is in charge of each part, and the mentors that associate with those parts of the team.

[Joey Milia]

People have already mentioned the problem of not having enough to do. There will be times durring build where you need every available person and others where you don't need very many. The difficulty is if someone feeling like they don't have anything to do they won't show up next time when you really do need them.

Another problem is in the management of the team. In smaller teams the team leader (or whoever is in charge) can oversee most of the people working to make sure everything progresses smoothly. But in a large team there is no way one person can see everything. There has to be several layers of management so the team leader only has to deal with less then ten people and still know about everything thats going on.

[Tom Line]

Organization.

1. Break the team into smaller teams. Chairmans, Business Plan, Spirit, Web page, Bylaws, Mechanical, Electrical, Outreach, Sponsorship.

2. For every team, have a student team leader.

3. For every team, have a set of goals. This should read like this:

A. Where are we now.
B. Where do we want to be at the end of the season.

Students are responsible for creating a timeline of progress that culminates in the final goal of their group. Weekly reports to mentors on progress help.

4. Veteran students (more than 2 years), are NOT ALLLOWED TO TOUCH ANYTHING for the first 3-4 weeks of the season. Their purpose is now to train the new incoming members. You will never have enough mentors for a team over 30 people, so you co-op your experienced members into teaching. Once you hit 'crunch time' as we call it, all bets are off and the experienced members jump in to get 'er done.

5. Train ahead of time. Do so in small groups. Not big all-must-attend meetings where people fall asleep, chat, and play on their phones. No more than 8 people at a time. Shop safety, basic programming, basic mechanical, etc.

[Jay O'Donnell]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

4. Veteran students (more than 2 years), are NOT ALLLOWED TO TOUCH ANYTHING for the first 3-4 weeks of the season. Their purpose is now to train the new incoming members. You will never have enough mentors for a team over 30 people, so you co-op your experienced members into teaching. Once you hit 'crunch time' as we call it, all bets are off and the experienced members jump in to get 'er done.

I thouroughly agree with all of your points except for this one. Build season is short enough as it is to have veterans wait until week 4 to do anything except teach. While I do agree that the veterans should be spending as much time as possible teaching the newbies, most of these veterans have probably waited their turn to be able to be in charge and be the lead builders for a season. I'm not saying that you're wrong, I just don't think making the veterans wait 3-4 weeks to touch the robot is fair, because they have already put at least 2 years into the team.

However your other points were spot on, great ideas!

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Jay Money 1058

I thouroughly agree with all of your points except for this one. Build season is short enough as it is to have veterans wait until week 4 to do anything except teach. While I do agree that the veterans should be spending as much time as possible teaching the newbies, most of these veterans have probably waited their turn to be able to be in charge and be the lead builders for a season. I'm not saying that you're wrong, I just don't think making the veterans wait 3-4 weeks to touch the robot is fair, because they have already put at least 2 years into the team.

However your other points were spot on, great ideas!

Tom brings up a great point here, but I do see where you are coming from Jay. It depends on how your team runs build season, size, and ratio of upperclassmen to lower classmen. If you had a huge increase in freshman you want your seniors and juniors to pass on as much information as possible this is a great method to enable the next generation.

That being said, many experienced teams spend weeks 1-3 prototyping and in depth design of their robot so not too much build/crunch time happens until week 4-5 when final parts start arriving and its time to put it all together. If this is how your season is run it is possible to have upperclassmen stay hands off until weeks 3-4 and still remain effective. It could prove healtheir because as you enter crunch time your seniors might have more energy to put into the robot instead of being physically and mentally exhausted come week 5.

[kiasam111]

In terms of the robot, we built 2 this season. The first was for prototyping, and was a backup in case our compbot was not ready. What we did was spent the first 2 weeks on protobot and then, using what we learnt on that, built our compbot in the remaining weeks. During this time, half the team continued building the protobot (as it wasn't completely done) and the other half worked on compbot.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by kiasam111

In terms of the robot, we built 2 this season. The first was for prototyping, and was a backup in case our compbot was not ready. What we did was spent the first 2 weeks on protobot and then, using what we learnt on that, built our compbot in the remaining weeks. During this time, half the team continued building the protobot (as it wasn't completely done) and the other half worked on compbot.

You bring up a very effective stratey most large teams can adapt to increase team participation on success.

In 2008 our team was large, I forget the numbers but it was a large group with a good number of mentors. Our team was hung up on whether or not we should build a fast lap robot or go with the flow of hurdling. It wasn't an easy decision. How many laps can you do while trying to hurdle? Considering our large sizea decision was made that we could resonable build two robots: our main hurdling robot, Fezzik, and a lapbot, Speedracer, to be used if Fezzik wasn't done in time or proved to be inefficient. Unfortunately both were finished and proved effective come the end of build season so we stuck with Fezzik robot for competition season and used the Speedracer at off-seasons and fill in. In following seasons we adapted to an iterative build process and a practice bot. Attached is a photo of the two at Beantown Blitz where both competed.

If my current team grew to a large size both in students and mentors I would seriously consider having a small team work on a very simple backup robot. Not only is it a great contigency plan, it keeps students busy, and during the off-season you can enter both depending on the event you attend.

[MARS_James]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

4. Veteran students (more than 2 years), are NOT ALLLOWED TO TOUCH ANYTHING for the first 3-4 weeks of the season. Their purpose is now to train the new incoming members. You will never have enough mentors for a team over 30 people, so you co-op your experienced members into teaching. Once you hit 'crunch time' as we call it, all bets are off and the experienced members jump in to get 'er done..

I really don't agree with this at all for several reasons but the one I don't agree with is the mentor statement since our team is sitting at 21 active mentors across the various sub-teams meaning a mentor for every 2 students right now.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by MARS_James

I really don't agree with this at all for several reasons but the one I don't agree with is the mentor statement since our team is sitting at 21 active mentors across the various sub-teams meaning a mentor for every 2 students right now.

Teams have different resources and operate differently based on those resources. Depending on one's mentor to student ratio, some teams might have to rely on upperclassmen to pass down knowledge and train new students due to a low number of mentors. We had more mentors our first season with fewer students than this past season.

You seem to have a very high number of mentors so a system like 1718's would never work for you guys!

[MARS_James]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

Teams have different resources and operate differently based on those resources. Depending on one's mentor to student ratio, some teams might have to rely on upperclassmen to pass down knowledge and train new students due to a low number of mentors. We had more mentors our first season with fewer students than this past season.

You seem to have a very high number of mentors so a system like 1718's would never work for you guys!

I was just stating that he said that you could never have enough mentors to mentor a team of 30 effectively and you can, and we do. We are lucky for it I do admit

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by MARS_James

I was just stating that he said that you could never have enough mentors to mentor a team of 30 effectively and you can, and we do. We are lucky for it I do admit

My apologies!

Interesting topic though when and if a team can reach mentor saturation! Depends on the team size, mentor dedication (every meeting, all day, one day, etc), and the number of sub-teams.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by MARS_James

I was just stating that he said that you could never have enough mentors to mentor a team of 30 effectively and you can, and we do. We are lucky for it I do admit

That's an amazing number of knowledgeable mentors. Congratulations!

We've found that without doing the method of member-mentorship (especially on the controls team), you have a couple students really good at programming who handle everything for a couple years, then graduate. You're left with a new team who hasn't really done much with the robot.

Our structure strives to avoid that. Since the vast majority of our code is written in the first four weeks or so, this allows the newer folks to write it and the more experienced ones to go through and do the final debugging.

It also is a great experience for the members to learn how to effectively teach concepts and application. We've never had any complaints: all the controls folks get a lot of hands-on time with the robot (especially the practice bot) in the final few weeks post-bag.

[Gray Adams]

Sorry to keep this short, but in a team of 55 people, the biggest challenge is keeping people busy and feeling useful. People stop showing up when they there no there is nothing to do. There is ALWAYS something to do, its just a matter of keeping your team leadership on top of assigning work. Nobody wants to come to shop hours if they do nothing and leave. Similarly, people may get bored of not doing direct robot work. Keep people involved and make sure they know their work is important. You need a cart, a crate, a pit design, t shirts,: sponsor logos, a website...make sure everyone knows a team with a great robot and nothing else doesn't look amazing. You need those things, and people need to be busy.

I would comment on shop tools and design teams, but phones aren't well suited to that much typing.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

4. Veteran students (more than 2 years), are NOT ALLLOWED TO TOUCH ANYTHING for the first 3-4 weeks of the season. Their purpose is now to train the new incoming members. You will never have enough mentors for a team over 30 people, so you co-op your experienced members into teaching. Once you hit 'crunch time' as we call it, all bets are off and the experienced members jump in to get 'er done.

Our mantra is that if we're training during build, we've already failed.

We hold a lot of workshops in the fall for new members and the unfortunate reality is that come the end of the first week of January, the train is leaving the station and anyone who didn't get on board back in October is probably going to be less involved than they'd like.

Kids will be building skills they haven't learned to fully utilize yet, but it's incredibly difficult to take someone who has no background in the basics and involve them in a meaningful manner, due to limited mentor hours available.

[Seth Mallory]

I fine nothing wrong with Tom Line's statement. Having the veterans learn how to teach and mentor will help them long after they have left the team. If you can make it work then good for you. Cory's point splits the team into two categories. Those including 256 and 192 that can train hard preseason and those that cannot. Some teams because how they are organize must do some or all of their training during build. If that is your only choice good for you for trying. It makes things harder for you but I for one support your efforts. Much better then no team. 192 is able to train during the fall with the veterans doing most of the teaching. If you look on how a Boy Scout troop is supposed to be organized and change the names in the boxes you have how 192 is organized.