How many team members?

[Garrett.d.w]

We have 21 on the official roster.
3 never show up

6 show up one to two days a week and go to our home regional. Their responsibility is to show up when they say they are. Most people in this group are either on the fence or are hooked but don't have the time to take responsibility for a greater project.

12 are part of the "core group", meaning they show up daily and have specialized skills and responsibilities that go beyond attendance. They tend to have specific projects during the build season.

[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?

[EricDrost]

MORT has over 100 students across our two teams, MORT (11) and MORT Beta (193).

Beta is a JV-style freshman only team so the split is roughly 75% - FRC 11, 25% - FRC 193.

[ttldomination]

We have about 15-20 students coming back with a healthy number of leaders.

We had ~40 new people show up to join, but we're only accepting 16 new members.

We hope to establish a team of 35-40 people this fall, and then carry all of those students into the spring.

- Sunny G.

[pntbll1313]

I find these polls interesting however I think they may be skewed quite a bit. I feel like in general more well established (most likely larger as well) teams will be surfing CD in mid-August. I know that in general teams that use CD may be a little more well established but I'd take a guess that if you posted this same poll in January you may get a lot more of the 10 person teams responding.

Another thought about this data is say 10% of team members regularly surf CD (that's a huge overestimate in August). That means that for a 10 person team maybe you'll get 1 vote. MORT may vote 10 times. This further skews the data as larger teams will be that much more represented besides my earlier point that they are more likely to be here in the first place...

Again I love polls like this but you probably get more useful info from the comments than the poll itself. Just a though

[BurkeHalderman]

This year we had 8 students on our team, 4 of them seniors. Currently we have 3 students, but are hoping to recruit some incoming freshman. Our goal is to have at least 10 student members. We do a lot of demos and are frequently at public events to talk about the team and FIRST, just hard to find interested kids in the rural community we're in.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by pntbll1313

I find these polls interesting however I think they may be skewed quite a bit. I feel like in general more well established (most likely larger as well) teams will be surfing CD in mid-August. I know that in general teams that use CD may be a little more well established but I'd take a guess that if you posted this same poll in January you may get a lot more of the 10 person teams responding.

Another thought about this data is say 10% of team members regularly surf CD (that's a huge overestimate in August). That means that for a 10 person team maybe you'll get 1 vote. MORT may vote 10 times. This further skews the data as larger teams will be that much more represented besides my earlier point that they are more likely to be here in the first place...

Again I love polls like this but you probably get more useful info from the comments than the poll itself. Just a though

I can see your point, but it is also interesting to see strong teams like 1323 and 973 have fewer than 20 members.

[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.

[Jay O'Donnell]

1058 had 10 members (kids who actually showed up on a consistent basis) and only one of us graduated this year. Due to new programs we run in the fall, we're hoping to retain at least 5 freshman this upcoming year.

[Ankit S.]

Our team officially has 40 members. However, only about 25-30 of those have shown up for more than a couple meetings. Out of those, only about 15 contributed to the team.

Our average meeting attendance is around 10 members, although we have had weeks in build season where the average was 3-4 and other weeks where the average was 15.

For those teams that have a lot of members showing up to meetings (15-20+), how do you keep all of them occupied?
We have troubles, especially at this stage in the offseason, when we generally have a handful of idle hands. With many of our offseason projects and improvements, we only have enough tools for one person to be machining and 2 people to be assembling per project.
We also can't just keep adding projects, as it may end up not being completed due to time, space, or money reasons.

[Domenic Rodriguez]

Team 316 has usually averaged about 8-10 students, although the past few years have been higher. Right now we have 13 students, 6 of whom are seniors.

[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.