Logging attendance

[Dale]

We've always tracked time for the ten years our team has existed. We started out with paper but as the team grew that became a lot of work for me and there was some time inflation. We switched to finger print terminals about 5 years ago and never looked back. Currently we use the FingerTec AC100C .

Hours are the currency of our program. Students need to log at least 50 hours in the fall to qualify for the competition team. Competition team members need to log at least 50 hours to qualify to miss school to come to the district events. Only the top 50% of the students can attend the world championships. Of course many students log way more than the minimum. So much so that we also set caps that they can't exceed 150 hours during the six week build season.

When a student applies to be a manager of a department, their hours are one of the things we look at. Sure there are other criteria as well, like how effective they were during those hours, but that at least sets an expectation that dedication matters.

I can't imagine running a FRC program and not tracking hours.