The Struggles of Bigger Teams

[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.