How do you deal with 60+ new members joining the team?

[Monochron]

My advice would be to do what my own team is trying to do right now (we doubled our team size this year and only have one additional mentor).

Parallelize, parallelize, parallelize. We are currently working to ensure we have a flatter leadership structure wherein different mentors, and different key students, fully own different portions of the team. Trying to have a couple people at the top getting involved in every aspect of the team can quickly become impossible as a team scales.

The real question though, is how to execute this. I'll explain what we are doing in two parts:

Students

• We are holding required "leadership seminars" for students who will be holding leadership positions on the team. At these we are focusing on accountability as a leader and how to actually be a leader (from "How to win friends and influence people"). Letting students fully own projects / aspects of projects will be needed for our larger team.
• We created an "Elders Council" made up of mentors and select students to make "strategic decisions requiring expediency". That covers decisions where we think students should have input, but don't want to slough through a conversation with the whole team.

Mentors

• We no longer have an overriding lesson plan that addresses each sub-team. The different aspects have been handed off fully to mentors leading those groups, meaning that those mentors plan every aspect of their sub-team's training. Sometimes they are even holding additional meetings for individual sub-teams.
• We have a week to week lesson plan that covers general activities that are useful for a FIRST team. Teamwork / leadership activities that revolve around building or some other aspect of FIRST, build challenges that require mechanical, electrical, and programming aspects, etc.
• We are having more frequent mentor meetings (~15 min following a meeting) to discuss any goings-on with the team that we may have missed.
• We also started a parent booster club in order to take some of the load off of mentors. We had to have one of our mentors as the president of the booster club though, as none of our parents wanted to step up.

[DonRotolo]

All good info.

This year we have about 60 veterans and 45 rookies. Most veterans are assigned a rookie, that rookie sticks with the veteran until the build season starts, so they learn how to do things and stay engaged.

Pi-Tech is where we teach the rookies (and some veterans) the skills they will need during build season. Basically we just have them design and build a robot...

[Chief Hedgehog]

We just had our first all-call for robotics - and we had nearly 30 new faces in the seats. We only have 24 returning members. I know that some have gone through 'cuts' or build JV teams, but we are entering our 3rd season and I don't think that we could handle that many kids (we don't have the resources or the mentors) and cutting kids would bring in bad publicity for our program that is funded only through sponsors.

I would like to hear some more creative ways to keep kids involved.

THanks!

[Boe]

We have had some large growth in our team recently, not nearly the amount some people are talking about but enough that we became concerned. A few things we tried to do to curb this is to raise the participation fee (we have a system in place to waive the fee due to financial hardships),slowly increasing the amount of minimum requirements and we introduced an essay as part of the application process. We don't turn anyone down due to the essay but it was a good deterrent to only get people who really wanted to be on the team. It worked alright and we've slowly managed to stabilize the size of our team, especially now that our last small graduating class (5 members) has gone.

[Whippet]

Originally Posted by Chief Hedgehog

We just had our first all-call for robotics - and we had nearly 30 new faces in the seats. We only have 24 returning members. I know that some have gone through 'cuts' or build JV teams, but we are entering our 3rd season and I don't think that we could handle that many kids (we don't have the resources or the mentors) and cutting kids would bring in bad publicity for our program that is funded only through sponsors.

I would like to hear some more creative ways to keep kids involved.

THanks!

We're in the same boat. We're usually a 15-person team, with an average of 4 people at any build meeting, but we had our first meeting today and had a total turnout of 31 people, four of whom were veterans.

We're considering dividing up the meetings by days of the week so that not everyone will have to show up every day, but everyone can still do significant work on the robot. Our robots in the past have tended to be too simple to necessitate more than four people at a time working on it. We're planning to use more advanced construction methods as well this year to compensate for the extra free person-hours. In addition, this will probably be the first year where we'll have a dedicated "Media and business" team for those who are so inclined. We may even have some awards submissions.

(Also, don't forget that by week 2, 25-50% of the team will have decided that it's too hard and will "leave" until week 6.)

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Whippet

(Also, don't forget that by week 2, 25-50% of the team will have decided that it's too hard and will "leave" until competition.)

Fixed that for you. (Back in the olden days of Nationals at Disney World, this was a bit of an issue for some teams--apparently, some folks joined just to get out of school and go to Disney for a few days--but I also seem to remember hearing that quite a few of such folks were hooked and didn't leave the school/shop for several weeks!)


In all seriousness, your job right now is to both retain and "weed". You want to retain as many students as possible, while weeding out the ones that are actually bad apples (NOT NECESSARILY the ones that are only in this for the college application!).

To that end, you have free labor, use it. Put in some shop organization time, some practice building time, encourage students to work hard at something productive while they're there (and clean up after they're done). I define something productive as "prototyping *random robot system*" and/or "shop organization/cleaning", but you may have other definitions, like "website construction" and "outreach activities so we have this same problem next year".

This has the side effect of giving a well-trained team when Kickoff rolls around and you actually build, but it primarily gives everybody a chance to see the time commitment and leave on their own, or become so engaged in the team that they're a contributing member of the team, all before build season. College application only? See if they regret not joining earlier. Here for the free food? Now's the time to teach TANSTAAFL and get them roped in to work--only if they want to work, of course, but "no work, no food" can work wonders.

Now, of course, if there are kids that are going to cause "drama", you'll also have a chance to see that and have the mentors take them to a corner of the build room for a little chat about stuff like this new-to-them idea of gracious professionalism and other such matters. Hopefully they get the general idea and stick around without the "drama". (Rather than the alternate chat of "here's the front door"...)

[Chief Hedgehog]

Does anyone have experience with the VEX Robotics Classroom kits (see here)? Could this be an option for developing a "JV" squad?

If there is 6 teams, could this be a great endeavor?

I am really pulling at straws here folks. We have a great team model already and this could strain our FRC team. We are trying to put our team on another level and I would hate to cut students that have potential.

We have had some success and we desire to become a great team in our state. However, I am really concerned about watering down our talent.

[Whippet]

Originally Posted by Chief Hedgehog

Does anyone have experience with the VEX Robotics Classroom kits (see here)? Could this be an option for developing a "JV" squad?

We had VEX classroom sets like those (without the field elements) back when we had a robotics class that we used to teach the students the basics of mechanical design. They worked very well for us, and the students from that class went on to become the leaders of our FRC team today. I would definitely recommend the classroom kits for their educational value alone, though I can't comment on the VRC as a whole, since my school hasn't yet decided to enter.

[M.Kong-Sivert]

We use FTC as offseason training, but seniors who have been in FIRST long enough are allowed to use this time for side projects.

I think one of the most important things to do is to keep the new people engaged as much as possible. Here are some suggestions that have worked well for us:

• Start each meeting with a round of Ninja or something similar.
• See if your sponsors would be willing to offer field trips for your team.
• Take the team to an offseason competition. It's great for team bonding, and, even though they didn't build the robot, the rookies will get a glimpse of what a FIRST competition looks like.

[bigbeezy]

We are in the same boat this year. We really pushed to get more exposure at our 2nd high school last year. The result is a massive influx of new members. Last year we peaked at about 60 and finished the year around 45. This year we are about 80. Really like the thoughts and things that other teams have mentioned in this thread. For our past couple meetings we've done team building games and things to get to know everyone. 2 of our veteran students led these and did an outstanding job.

Starting next week we are having new students go though a series of training seminars. We split the 40-50 newbies into 4 groups that will spend time at different stations (2 mechanical, 1 electrical, and 1 outreach). This will last for the next 4 weeks. Hope is to give everyone some a foundation of the basic things that we do. At each station the group will take part in a project building something so that we are still accomplishing tasks and they get hands on experience.

Meanwhile the veterans not hosting the trainings will be working on a variety of other projects. Space is arguably our biggest obstacle. Our shop can't hold everyone in our shop (off campus location) so we are sending some students to one of our high schools that is nearby. Definitely going to be a challenge

[IronicDeadBird]

LAZER TAG!
But seriously its hard to get my team to drop the roles they have and make room for more people after a solid year of getting to be closely knit. Let more people participate so start simple have them be involved with something where making new friends is natural. The main thing is that if you think of the team where one person is a ring and you want all the rings to be more closely knit you adding rings to the outside is less effective at bonding then adding them to the heart of the team.

[The_ShamWOW88]

Man, I wish we had 60+ new students join in one given year. Our team used to have a massive influx of new students year in and out but the program as of the last 4 - 5 years, we've lost more to graduation and such than we've gained.

[gblake]

Cross-linking to a long-ish post I just added to a similar thread.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...45&postcount=5

I am dismayed at how many posters (not all, but many) approach this sort of question from an FRC-only mindset.

Borrow some dynamite and blow yourself out of that rut! The universe of valuable extracurricular (and classroom) STEM programs is sooo much bigger than just FRC.

The vision of the programs is changing the fabrics of entire communities and societies. That involves hundreds of children, and the adults around them. The vision is not having one FRC team in each North American high school.

When you are blessed with an abundance of students, engage them in an abundance of activities offered by an abundance of STEM education organizations!