How many team members?

[sanddrag]

I'm curious what those of you with over 50 students do with them all. It sounds like a logistical nightmare. Also, how many mentors do you have when you have a team of 50 or 70?

[Seth Mallory]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I'm curious what those of you with over 50 students do with them all. It sounds like a logistical nightmare. Also, how many mentors do you have when you have a team of 50 or 70?

For us during the fall we teach engirneering, shop and mangment. During build the students run the team and captain has to keep things running. Last year during build the the team built during 3 robots, 6 drive gear boxes, and at least 12 other gear boxes. All the gear boxes are custom designed and built by the students. We have lots of work and all students are lathe and milling machine trained. We have 3 mentors now and may get 2 more during build for a couple of hours a week.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I'm curious what those of you with over 50 students do with them all. It sounds like a logistical nightmare. Also, how many mentors do you have when you have a team of 50 or 70?

As Drost pointed out for 11, there are two teams now - 11 and 193.

11 builds two full robots to keep their students happy and also tries to take part in all aspects of FRC from animation to mechanical. The diversity in sub-teams allows for mostly everyone to have a job.

Plenty of work to do all the time, it's usually just a matter of which kids actually step up to do something.

http://mort11.org/sub-teams for more information

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I'm curious what those of you with over 50 students do with them all. It sounds like a logistical nightmare. Also, how many mentors do you have when you have a team of 50 or 70?

To answer the second question, my team has 32 mentors and a booster club-- the "mentor" designation is specifically for adults that work with a designated subteam or subteams on our team, and who show up regularly enough that they can actually contribute (a metric which varies based on what subteam we're talking about-- the mentors for build subteams tend to be around more often than the mentors for our media or finance groups).

As for how my team manages having 83 students, we first divide them into subteams, some of which couldn't exist without this many people-- for example, we have four different "manipulator" subteams which work on different aspects of of whatever we're using to play the game that year. Another subteam that wouldn't exist if we didn't have so many people is our "Lighting up robotics" subteam, which (drawing from our team motto), is a bunch of kids who like electronics but for whatever reason don't want to/like working on the robot-- they work year-round to make cool new LED things for team members to wear or to hang in our pit or whatever. We also tend to do things in parallel-- having multiple groups working on the same problem helps both the students and our mentors grow (which is good because most of our mentors showed up in the last 2-3 years).

[sanddrag]

For those of you with very small teams (less than 14), who funds this and how do you justify the cost? Seems like an awfully large amount of money to spend for a relatively small number of students.

[Jay O'Donnell]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

For those of you with very small teams (less than 14), who funds this and how do you justify the cost? Seems like an awfully large amount of money to spend for a relatively small number of students.

Our very small team is funded by our town, school, and multiple other sponsors. In the end, I wouldn't say that it's a lot of money to spend on a small number of students when our group of students inspires our entire school and community. A team's success isn't defined by the amount of students it has, it's defined by the amount of people they inspire to become interested in engineering. I'm proud to say that our "small team" has made a big impact.

[Kevin Leonard]

20 has about 85~ students, but we struggle to keep them all engaged.

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I'm curious what those of you with over 50 students do with them all. It sounds like a logistical nightmare. Also, how many mentors do you have when you have a team of 50 or 70?

Exactly, it is. One of our major goals this coming season is to engage more students on the team. Right now, of these 80-some students, maybe 40 do a decent amount of work during the build season, 20 are a major part, and 10 show up near-daily. For 80 kids, that's not a lot.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Thunder910

20 has about 85~ students, but we struggle to keep them all engaged.



Exactly, it is. One of our major goals this coming season is to engage more students on the team. Right now, of these 80-some students, maybe 40 do a decent amount of work during the build season, 20 are a major part, and 10 show up near-daily. For 80 kids, that's not a lot.

MORT has put all the mechanisms into place to allow any and all students to be engaged and involved in the team in all aspects. By having them create practice bots, creating prototypes in the Fall, running workshops in the Summer, having a full FRC based robotics curriculum in school, having multiple sub-teams, and having team 193, we've created several avenues of engagement. At this point, I believe that getting more students fully engaged is no longer up to us, but now it falls on the students to put into this program whatever they want to get out of it. I believe that after a certain point, there is only so much you can do to coax the students into being as dedicated to the team as other students are. At the end of the day, we have plenty of engaged students who will see more leadership opportunities and privileges than their less-involved peers.

Originally Posted by Thunder910

How do you find the funding to fund two whole teams?

As for funding; our district has always supported us since we started out, and it has increased steadily, with a big boom in the past 3 seasons. We have FIRST programs throughout the district in all schools and the community is well aware of the team. Our new lead mentor, David Bodmer, is also extremely personable and this helps reach out to members of the community who rally for the team. The principal and superintendent work with the lead mentor and he is able to sell the program to them very effectively and show growth, as well as team accomplishments. Now, the district helps pay for much of 193 and also for 11's entrance fees because our team has such a strong background in gaining corporate sponsors. We have proved that we are not solely reliant on district funding, and I think that is why we are a responsible investment to them. We have also hosted the NJ FLL Tournament for years, and now the Mt. Olive District event. Again, proving responsibility. We have had multiple visits from politicians, so that provides the district with credibility on their end because it shows the public the effectiveness of our programs.

In all honesty, we are most likely just incredibly lucky to have certain people on our team and in the community looking out for us as well as a strong lead mentor and amazing team parents/mentors.

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

In all honesty, we are most likely just incredibly lucky to have certain people on our team and in the community looking out for us as well as a strong lead mentor and amazing team parents/mentors.

Luck and commitment by quite a few people to keep doing this since 1997.

The demonstration that Team 11 and now Team 193 has endured the good and the bad over all this time is a real litmus test of the value of investing in it.

It's why I keep opening my wallet and helping where I can as well.

Each year the pile of parts gets deeper, the resources increase and every year (even in the ones things do not turn out so well) more students get the opportunity to participate.

There is a critical mass and if you can reach it through various avenues new opportunities open.

[MrJohnston]

Four years ago, our team had around 30 members.... Last year, we started the season with over 100 and ended with over 70... We had 32 kids ante-up to go to St. Louis and 50 who lettered.... Only six graduated.... We are bracing for more this year.

What do we do? We are expanding our program to offer FTC teams... We have formal training that focuses on giving veterans the opportunity to specifically tutor rookies... We are actively seeking a lot of outreach... We are building several robots during fall training, so that even the newest members "touch robots." We form subgroups to work on specfic parts of the robot... Etc. Competition-wise, we are going to a fall event and hoping to add a third district competition - in which we would let the younger kids run the show.

And, we work our many mentors really hard.

[evanperryg]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I'm curious what those of you with over 50 students do with them all. It sounds like a logistical nightmare. Also, how many mentors do you have when you have a team of 50 or 70?

We have 49 students. Of them, 9 are graduating. We have 13 mentors, none leaving (that I know of). We also handed out about 200 flyers to students who go to our high schools. It really isn't bad, logistically, if you effectively arrange your team. We have a few main subteams; mechanical, CAD, electrical, programming, and business. This season, we had 9 members in programming, 6 in business, 3 in CAD(we hope to get this number up), 5 in electrical, and the remaining 26 in mechanical. That sounds imbalanced, but it actually works out great. We divide mechanical into groups that each work on a specific robot mechanism (this year included curved shooter, linear shooter, drive train, ground collector, shooter angle, and climber team). Electrical and programming work with each of the mechanical subgroups so that they can get their prototypes wired and programmed. Sounds complicated on paper, works flawlessly in practice.

[Walter Deitzler]

We have 4 Students, but Club Fair is coming up, so we hope to have 10+ after that. Training them will be fun, but worth it.