Training team

[QuentinW]

Hi All,

Our team was struggling with the issue of having more students than we had jobs/responsibilities and we implemented a JV and Varsity team structure this year to help handle this issue. Overall, the results have been very positive. I'll give you a bunch of details for anyone who is interested.

Structure:
Our Varsity group has a typical structure of a FIRST team, with 4 Robot Engineering Sub-teams, and 2 Marketing/Web Sub-teams. This was 25 students who were selected by Sub-team mentors to be on their Sub-teams. Varsity team members are asked to contribute 14 hours/week (on average).

The remaining ~25 students were separated into 4-6 member project-based JV teams. These were all non-essential projects such as Robot Aesthetics, Robot Cart, Pit, etc... Each of these groups had a adult mentor or mentors who oversaw the project and helped guide, teach and enable the JV members. JV team members are asked to contribute 10 hours/week on average.

Results:
It is a little premature to say we have had conclusive results as we have only had this structure for 10 months, but so far we have had mostly pros and fewer cons. So please keep that in mind when you read this.

Generally, the JV teams gave students more responsibility, leadership opportunities, learning opportunities and interest in FIRST. In addition, it provided a nice platform for new mentors to get involved in a real way without having to commit endless hours, or be on the line for critical systems.

We have also seen over this first summer that some students have been more committed to learning and outreach with a vested interest in making the Varsity team next year.

The biggest impact this has made is that we have had fewer students "participating" on the team without doing much. We haven't figured out how to get 50 students or various skill levels to build a robot together, so adding more projects with discrete goals and deadlines has helped ensure that all of our students can contribute in meaningful ways.

The major con of this structure is that the JV/Varsity split needs more resources to run. More mentors, more cost, more build space. I can't see JV project teams operating well without a mentor to help oversee the project. We have talked about Varsity students running JV teams, but we haven't done so far. Our JV team projects cost between $50 and $200. This isn't inhibitive, but is worth noting that you need to budget for each team.

My only regret is that we didn't switch to this team structure once our team was larger than 25 members. The transition has been alright, but I'm sure there are some second year students who weren't happy to be on the newly minted JV team. We are planning on adding a fall robotics competition for the JV team.

I really do recommend this, or something like it if you feel it can work for your team.