How many hours does your team work during the build season? Pol

[dk5sm5luigi]

Our team starts at 10 hours a week and works our way up to 15 hours a week.

[cmrnpizzo14]

We schedule 3 hrs on Tuesday and Thursday and then 8 hours on Saturday. This usually runs over a little bit and towards the end of build season we will schedule more for select groups of students and mentors to ensure completion and driver practice.

For the teams that work 40+ hours a week, do you really find it being that beneficial? I feel that with our team working a max of about 16 hours a week during the standard build season we field incredibly competitive robots and if we added more hours we would burn out and just lose productivity.

[magnets]

Well, our schedule is like this
6:00 - 9:30 Monday thru Thursday (14 hours)
Saturday 9:00 am to 5:00 pm (8 hours)
Sunday 11:00 am to 9:00 pm (10 hours)
for a total of 32 hours.

However, many students work on the robot from 7:00 to 7:45 am, during school, study halls, and lunch, and after school for an hour or so. Also, as the build season progresses, we end up using as much time as the school lets us, which is

6:00-10:30 Monday thru Thursday (18 hours)
Saturday 9:00 to 9:00 (12 hours)

Sunday 9:00 to 9:00 (12 hours)

for a total of 42 exhausting hours
(even more if we meet at a mentors house, or if it's a 3-day weekend).

If we did this often, we would all die, so this only happens usually on weeks five and six.

After bag/tag, our team usually doesn't meet for 5 days, as we all need to spend time with our families, jobs, and homework, before they start getting too angry at us.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by cmrnpizzo14

For the teams that work 40+ hours a week, do you really find it being that beneficial? I feel that with our team working a max of about 16 hours a week during the standard build season we field incredibly competitive robots and if we added more hours we would burn out and just lose productivity.

Could we build a robot in less time, yes. Would our team be nearly as close to each other as we are and would we be able to help as many other teams, probably not. We're also exchanging time for other resources that we don't have like lathe and mill access. Like I said this isn't the entire team, last year around 5 students probably put in that amount in most weeks and that's time with the team, they're not always working on the robot.

The way our team runs, I don't leave until the last student does (as in there are no set end times to our meetings) and normally I'm their later working on things like the blog, ordering parts, helping other teams over email, and reading CD.

[cadandcookies]

By my count, my team has around 20 "scheduled" hours for meetings (significantly more the first couple weeks-- ~30-35), but our schedule doesn't count the considerable amount of students who come in at 9AM on Saturday and don't leave until it's Sunday. I'd say the team average for "shop time" is around 25-30 hours, with some members pushing that up to 40+.

If we're counting non-shop time I think it would be a little bit scary to see what number that ended up as.

To be honest, thus far we haven't noticed our robot performance go up with more hours, mostly because we haven't really held to any sort of schedule or had any strategic plan that we held to throughout the season. Time can only get you so far. The extra time mostly goes towards getting everyone on the team comfortable with each-other.

[Ankit S.]

Our scheduled time is usually around 22 hours during the first half of the season, but after the finals break it can creep up to around 30 hours per week.

That count is scheduled meeting time, some students often work outside that time frame too, and rack an upwards of 50 hours per week.

[Christopher149]

Our schedule is:

M-F: 6-9pm
Sat: 1-6pm (this is approximate, and can change year-to-year)

So, about 20 hours (I voted for <30, since we are on the edge). We never really work extra, except that we often work until midnight the last night before bag. About the only exception is a few kids have worked on something-or-other during shop class a few times a few years.

I'm frankly surprised by those who can find 50 hours in a week; when are you doing this, all day?

As far as I know, the school doesn't have any particular restrictions on when we can be there. We even usually show up on snow days when the weather is actually acceptable. This year, for example, the HS had a faintly ridiculous number of snow days, but the only one that I recall that canceled our meeting also led to the university being closed, and I couldn't get out my driveway to get to the HS.

[Mr V]

Our shop is usually open from 3pm until 8~10 pm M-F depending on exactly what is going on, with some nights occasionally running as late as midnight on school days. On Saturdays and other school holidays there is typically someone there from 10am to 10pm. Of course not everyone is there all of those hours. Most students will typically put in 15~20 hrs per week. As Bag day nears the more likely someone will be staying late and we have been known to keep the shop open for 48 or more hours straight the days right before bag day, working in shifts.

[BBray_T1296]

Our team requires all members to log 40 hours in the 6 week build season to be allowed to get field-tripped out for competition. We meet 4-~10pm weekdays and 10am-~8pm saturday. We always have 6-8 dedicated students there every single meeting.

Also, on bag up day our drive team goes on a "field trip" from school (to the lab in Computer hall) and works feverishly to finish the robot 7am-midnight

[smclean1969]

When our team made it to the Championship event in 2012, I did an informal poll of teams around our pit area and it seemed that most teams were putting in 20-24 hours per week on official practice times. Obviously some are putting in substantially more hours and others less.

For what it's worth, I've built a rough estimation approach that can typically determine a team's performance. The number of hours put into prior to and during the build season are one of the primary factors indicating how successful a team will be. There's just no way for a team to be consistently successful without working very hard.

Now, teams with increased resources and better machining shops in particular can produce prototype and competition parts much, much faster than some other teams. This may save them a tremendous amount of time but most of them simply use that time to produce a better robot instead of taking the time off.

One thing I'd caution folks about too is losing all perspective on this. Don't let a robot competition become a higher priority than your grades. It doesn't do the students any good to win tournaments and not get into solid college programs. It doesn't do our sponsors any good if we're not producing future technical leaders at the expense of winning a tournament.

[Chris is me]

With the exception of an exam week during Week 3 (no scheduled classes so students build throughout the day), 2791 has in the past met Monday / Wednesday 3-8 PM and Tuesday / Thursday / Friday 3 - 5:00 PM. 16 hours a week. During crunch time we make Thursdays run until 8 PM for a 19 hour a week schedule.

Meeting on weekends is extremely unusual for us, excluding drive practice and the last weekend of build season (usually the same thing).

If you summed up our entire 2013 build season "in meeting" time, we met for around 120 hours. Lots of work was done outside of meeting times (mostly CAD / planning).

[Samwaldo]

Our official meeting times are
Monday - Friday 6pm-10pm.
But a teacher is there at 2 pm right after school and usually 2-4 students work on the robot starting at 2.

On Saturdays (and Sundays occasionally) 9/10am - 9am.

These are our favorite days because the mentors usually have had at least 3 dunkin donuts runs for coffee, and all the students have a few Mobile runs to get bottles of mountain dew.

Some of our funniest memories are from these 12hr meetings like when the wood shop decided to prank the metal shop. The wood shop mentors and students told a freshmen to go into the other room, and say that they were about to sand a battery so that it can fit in the battery holder. so the freshmen did this and even turned the sander on and slowly put the battery towards it. Not until the last second did somebody catch that was happened. Previously all that they had said was "be safe" "put your safety glasses on".

The long days are not only fun but there team bonding, and alot of work gets done.

[evanperryg]

We usually schedule ~22 hours a week. 3 hours monday-friday, 7 on Saturday. However, there are many nights that students and mentors will stay well past the scheduled time. In fact, I was once in the shop until 2 in the morning with one mentor and one of the drivers. Most students log about 100-120 hours during build season, though some of us logged well over 200.

[Ben Martin]

Officially, we are:
12PM-6PM Sunday
6PM-9PM Monday-Friday
8AM-6PM Saturday
The start times are usually fairly static, but it is common for the end times to push until as late as 10PM or 11PM.

The average student attends 10-20 hours/week of the scheduled 31 (more is required for student leaders). We try to keep the shop open as much as we can to keep the process moving (not everyone can work on the robot at once, so we might as well stagger the time so all the students can have "hands-on" time and more can be accomplished). Quite a bit of design discussion also goes on outside of build hours.

[T^2]

Last year was a bit of an anomaly for us in terms of hours spent. The nominal schedule was:

W, Th: 2:45-5:30
S, Su: 9a-5p

However, as the weeks went on, it became closer to:

M, T, F: 3:45-10
W, Th: 2:45-10
S, Su: 8a-10p

Holidays also followed the weekend schedule. Not everyone attended every hour, of course.