How to deal with lack of participation

[GeeTwo]

Our competition is only an hour drive away, so all of the team is welcome to come on Saturday, but only the varsity members get to take the field trip on Thursday and Friday. Participation and quality of work are the main factors feeding into varsity and officer selection. In recent years, we have also "selected" for the team, even at the junior varsity level. This year, we had massive initial interest, largely due to our air cannon, so we held formal "tryouts" up front. Programming, controls, and mechanical department student leads and mentors set up a number of challenges ranging from building a tower from blocks, to drawing an out-of-scale drawing with labels to scale, to programming a couple of servos with an arduino. The key was that we were really scoring on attitude and care in craftsmanship more than aptitude as far as being selected for the team; aptitude and requests were also factored into department assignments. By the end of tryouts, about 1/3 of the people who started had already dropped out on their own, then we culled out the team members who had shown a lack of engagement, poor quality work due to lack of trying or attention, or poor attitude (especially whining). Even after selection, if a team member misses several meetings without advance notice and importance of cause, (s)he will likely be demoted or cut. Our school also allows students to "letter" in robotics. We had letter pins custom made with the team logo: . To qualify for a letter, a team member must meet three of four criteria: fund raising, selection for varsity, participation in a (non-robot) committee, and service hours.