FIRST and grades

[Carolyn_Grace]

This is a great question.
I'd like to offer a couple followup questions:

How do teams ensure that students grades stay up and/or improve?

What policies do teams have for student grades?

What are suggestions to help students who have lower grades, but clearly *need* this FIRST experience in their lives?

[IndySam]

We require a minimum of a C in every class. If any student gets bellow a C they are not allowed to travel with the team.

We as mentors are not allowed to see any of the students grade but our teacher sponsors check them on a regular basis.

The travel rule becomes a good stick, if a student falls below a C they must work out a written plan with their teacher in the class to bring their grade up. This has been a successful and positive policy for the students.

Also all students must get permission from all their teachers to miss days in school.

[martin417]

If anything, I would say that FIRST has a negative effect on grades. I know that my son's grades went down when he was involved (graduated in 2009). However, I have found that grades are an artificial measure of progress at best. I would say the experience gained by the kids, in math, science and engineering, as well as working in a team environment, problem solving, etc. far outweigh the temporary negative impact on grades.

[EricVanWyk]

I've mentored several teams that monitor students' grades, and one that actively tutored students. This is a great way to pull in timid potential mentors: So many great potential mentors beg off of FRC because they believe themselves to be under-qualified, but mentoring in a subject they are confident in is a very gentle trojan horse. This has a very positive effect on students' grades... I'm not as convinced that monitoring has a positive effect.

[SarahBeth]

Originally Posted by Carolyn_Grace

This is a great question.
I'd like to offer a couple followup questions:

How do teams ensure that students grades stay up and/or improve?

What policies teams have for student grades?

What are suggestions to help students who have lower grades, but clearly *need* this FIRST experience in their lives?

1. Offer a study hall before meetings for homework to be done if mentors or teachers are able to be there. We don't meet until 6pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays so students are able to go home and do homework or stay at school.

2. We follow our school's policy for travel (see above) - C or better in academic subjects, B or better in technical trade.

3. See number 1 - study hall or make an expectation that students seek extra help before going to robotics. Or have team members offer to tutor those who are struggling.

Also all students must get permission from all their teachers to miss days in school.

We do this too.

[mathking]

Our students have the same rules as any other extra curricular participant, which in the case of our district means a minimum 2.0 GPA, no failures. We certainly have students who become more serious about school because of FRC, and as a result their grades improve. And we have students who spend too much time during build season. In the past this was a bigger problem, and as a result we changed our build season by cutting down on build time.

We meet two days a week after school from 3:00 - 5:00, two evenings a week from 6:30 - 8:30 (sometimes 9:00) and Saturdays from 9:00 - 4:00. At the end of build season we will sometimes throw in a Friday or an extended Saturday. We also have some outreach events during build season (though we try to do these more outside of build). We used to spend more time. And there were years when we worked 6:00 - 10:00 every evening for the final three weeks. I realized this was not healthy more family, and that realization made me focus on the fact that it was not good for the kids either. Most kids are not there every evening. We had about 45 kids who worked on the robot this year (plus more who mainly did outreach stuff or were learning programming or other tasks) so we have different component teams meet when it is best for those teams. I think this has largely mitigated the negative effect on grades for most students. (I also think that the attention to the process of building the robot our downshift in time necessitated has allowed us to make better robots.)

We are in the middle of a project to collect data to try to examine the effect of FIRST participation on grades and other achievement measures.

[SarahBeth]

We are in the middle of a project to collect data to try to examine the effect of FIRST participation on grades and other achievement measures.

I'd be interested in seeing this data.

[Taylor]

As others have said - team rules dictate that if students don't have at least a C- in every course, they don't travel. Concessions have been made on an individual basis with teachers who have requested that students travel even though they don't meet the grade requirement - teachers recognize the experience of 2 days at event would have a greater impact on the student than 2 days in class. Usually there's extra classwork for these kids.

[treffk]

I really like the no grades below a C thing. For our school ineligibilty is determined based on if you have 1 or more F's or 2 or more D's.