Hours worked

[hardcopi]

Any other teams keeping track of total hours worked for the season? We have the kids and mentors punch in and out. They need 100 hours to qualify for a Varsity letter. (among other requirements)

Just checked and our team so far this season has clocked a combined total of 68 days and 59 minutes of work. I know there are kids who don't bother punching in too.

Curious how it compares with everyone else.

Rich.

[Joseph Smith]

When I was a student and we had a very small team, I would average about 36 hours a week, including weekends, and often more then that towards bag day. Now the most active members and mentors on our team probably do north of 30 hours a week.

[MrJohnston]

We aren't tracking them that closely, but... We have taken two days off since kick-off... Everybody put in about 25 hours kickoff weekend. Since then, we have had the shop up and running from 5-9PM every day except Saturdays and Sundays. Saturdays, we've gone from 9AM-5PM. We've taken the last two Sundays off.... So that's 97 hours of "stuff" going on so far. We've had anywhere from 15-90 kids and 1-15 mentors present at any given time.

Then, there are the hours that folks spend at home..........

[hardcopi]

<cough>... did you say 90?

[MrJohnston]

Yeah.... And we shrunk this year....
We've had as many as 140 kids on our time over the last couple years... We'd be close to that again this year, but we share a lot of kids with the marching band. The band changed their meeting days to correspond with our training - and made attendance part of their grade... So we lost most of our band kids.

We'd like to split into two (or four??) different teams, but can only get one work space.

[Pretzel]

I'm not sure if my team logs hours specifically, we track attendance, but I personally log my hours spent and I'm up to 92 hours spent on robotics since Kickoff as of last night.

I wonder how many man-hours are spent on FRC by all the team combined throughout the build season?

[hardcopi]

We have 20-30 kids at any given time and finding jobs for them all can be difficult. My heart goes out to you trying to corral that many and keep them organized.

[catacon]

Our shop is officially open 33 hours every week during the build season. We often have kids and mentors that put in more hours, though. There are on average 10 students and 5 mentors in the shop at any time, so that's close to 3100 man-hours in a build season.


And yeah...90 students?! We have trouble maintaining control when our full team of 20-30 students is at the shop.

[Jon Stratis]

We do track team member attendance, but I don't have the numbers available here.

I do know my personal attendance though, I record it for work... So far this calendar year, 78 hours of volunteer time total! That includes team meetings, regional planning committee work, and LRI Training in NH. It also explains why I'm so tired every January and February...

[hardcopi]

Well for this season we are trying something different. I wrote a website that the team logs into and out of. Keeps track of hours, students, permission slips, events, sponsors, etc. Still VERY buggy, but it is getting there.

[MrJohnston]

It's really not that bad... The toughest years were the three over which we grew from 30 to 140.... We struggled to create enough bureaucracy fast enough to keep it organized... We have very separate teams for programming, CAD, systems, mechanical, business and marketing... We are building two identical robots (competition and practice) plus repair older robots - until we desperately cannibalize them for parts (after which we fix them again)- so that we can keep multiple kids practicing driving at the same time.... Our elected VP's are responsible for setting up schedules for the kids in their subgroups and are encouraged to find smaller leadership opportunities for other veterans.. Our outreach efforts have gone through the roof... And, this year, we are trying to get a dance team going...

Frankly, I could not do it without all our mentors. I largely act as a CEO and delegate most of the work to our mentors - letting them run with things.

But, yes, there are times it can be hard to keep all the kids busy.

[Allison K]

We just broke 2000 hours for the current school year

787 student hours so far if we only count build season.

At this point we don't track mentor hours.

Not bad for a 17 member team.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Team stuff... hmm, I think I'm just under 20 hours total. Not counting the commute.

[Ginger Power]

I don't know team hours but I do have some pretty crazy personal hours! If you count doing Ri3D that's 72 hours minus 5 for sleeping. Currently mentoring 3 different teams (4607, 4818, 4320) depending on whether I'm at college or at home. Every Saturday I put in 12 hours at home. During the week it's been sporadic but averaging around 12 hours a week. So added up that's around 103 hours give or take. Of course that doesn't account for time spent CADing and doing other miscellaneous robotics tasks in my free time. It definitely doesn't include the time I spend on Chief Delphi! I would be scared to look at those numbers.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

We have 70 students registered this year. We must take attendance as the team is a class in our district. We limit students to certain days so we don't have a bunch sitting around and doing nothing. I would not be surprised for our regular students to be at at least 16 hours each per week. As for myself, a few years ago I started adding up hours and quit counting at 800 for the year. This week I will have logged 24 hours by the end of tomorrow's FTC Tournament not including Inspector work.