How to deal with lack of participation

[Fields]

Our team only met a couple of times last fall being our first year and not knowing what to expect.

How often do some of you meet in the fall?
Obviously, with enough effort you could meet and do stuff every day, but I don't want to burn out the students OR the mentors.

Right now, I'm thinking about once every two-three weeks mostly for figuring stuff out for next year. Then maybe once a week in the fall for training/team building/media/practice/hangouts.

[The other Gabe]

Originally Posted by Fields

Our team only met a couple of times last fall being our first year and not knowing what to expect.

How often do some of you meet in the fall?
Obviously, with enough effort you could meet and do stuff every day, but I don't want to burn out the students OR the mentors.

Right now, I'm thinking about once every two-three weeks mostly for figuring stuff out for next year. Then maybe once a week in the fall for training/team building/media/practice/hangouts.

My team usually meets once or twice a week (tusedays or thursdays), with some offseason projects and training sessions mixed in there. we also like to hang out during that time, and very few of the meetings are mandatory- just an open shop for those who want it

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by jvriezen

In a similar vein, failure on the field should not be tied to failure of the team. One of my best memories in FIRST is on Friday evening team meeting at a regional where our robot basically contributed nothing to our alliances all day and we mentors decided to focus on the positive and ask for kids to talk about what went well. We figured on about 10 minutes of talk on that at most. We got about 45 minutes. Saturday went no better on the field. Our robot scored once, the entire weekend. Our positives were our ability to help other teams, and how the team worked together furiously to try to resolve our mechanical and programming difficulties. Oh, and we won the GP award.

Good on you. I really like this. It kind of sounds obvious but it is something I wish I had thought to do at our last regional, which went pretty much exactly like you described yours. I will for sure try to follow your lead next time.

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

So we have like 5-6 random people there everyday but most of them dont know that they are doing and we dont have time mid build season to teach them. the other issue is we get students at random times of the year. we could be on week 4 of build season and someone new walks through the door. As much as we would like to say we are mid build season so you really cant be here. We have to let them in due to our lack of members. My mentor has adopted a quote of "How do you join? you show up. How do you get responsibility? you take it". that sound great but it ends up creating loose members and people who dont know what they are doing.

It can help if you have more mentors. I was the newbie mentor on the software team which already had ample students and mentors. I was able to work almost one-on-one with one of the younger students who was enthusiastic but felt he couldn't contribute because he didn't know things. I often would say "Well, I don't know the answer to that either, let's find out!" and led by example an attitude of learning to solve problems. The attitude I was trying to set was "I don't need to know all the answers, I just need to know how to find them". I also tried to steer him toward successes and accomplishments within his capability so he wouldn't feel like he wasn't contributing. I received a lot of positive comments from the other mentors and even other students.

Maybe the bottom line is this. Some mentors think they are here to build a robot. I think I am here to build the students. That's what will keep them coming back.

[Sperkowsky]

Originally Posted by GreyingJay

Good on you. I really like this. It kind of sounds obvious but it is something I wish I had thought to do at our last regional, which went pretty much exactly like you described yours. I will for sure try to follow your lead next time.



It can help if you have more mentors. I was the newbie mentor on the software team which already had ample students and mentors. I was able to work almost one-on-one with one of the younger students who was enthusiastic but felt he couldn't contribute because he didn't know things. I often would say "Well, I don't know the answer to that either, let's find out!" and led by example an attitude of learning to solve problems. The attitude I was trying to set was "I don't need to know all the answers, I just need to know how to find them". I also tried to steer him toward successes and accomplishments within his capability so he wouldn't feel like he wasn't contributing. I received a lot of positive comments from the other mentors and even other students.

Maybe the bottom line is this. Some mentors think they are here to build a robot. I think I am here to build the students. That's what will keep them coming back.

I guess it all comes back to us needing mentors.

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

I guess it all comes back to us needing mentors.

I think it would certainly help. It would give you the flexibility to do some of the suggestions mentioned in other posts, like having closer supervision, you can do separate activities with the skilled/experienced students and different ones with the less experienced ones (like simpler tasks or training) so they feel involved too. You can have more sub-teams each tasked with different deliverables. You can start looking at tasks which are indirectly robot related, like a team to shoot and edit the robot reveal video, a team responsible for running your team website or social media, a team dedicated to, I dunno, food prep for your meetings, social planning, business planning, marketing, fundraising, etc.

[Alyssa]

This has been an issue that our team has been combating for years...a few years ago I think I remember starting off with 30 freshman and ending the season with 2. However, we've been working really hard on it and this year I think we started with around 25-30 freshman and have only lost about 5.

To combat this issue in the offseason, we meet about once a week for general meetings and updates, however, just about every weekend in the offseason we have either trainings happening for new members, or a community service event.

Joining a team can be more than intimidating for rookie members. All of the older students seem to know so much more, and mentors are terrifying. It's really easy to get lost in the shuffle. What our team does to combat this is a requirement that ever rookie member earn certifications in at least 2 domains of the team. For example, if a student wants to become certified in electronics, they go to 3-4 classes taught by the leadership student in charge of electronics, take an informal test and then are officially certified to work in that department during the season. Along with giving us a competent workforce come kickoff, the program allows rookie members to get involved and excited to do what they learned about.

Another thing is off season competitions. I can't stress this enough. My rookie year, I fell in love with robotics at Battle at the Border, by meeting new people and getting to see other robots. Off seasons really give students an idea for what they signed up for, and give them an idea of what they are working towards.

[Sperkowsky]

Originally Posted by GreyingJay

I think it would certainly help. It would give you the flexibility to do some of the suggestions mentioned in other posts, like having closer supervision, you can do separate activities with the skilled/experienced students and different ones with the less experienced ones (like simpler tasks or training) so they feel involved too. You can have more sub-teams each tasked with different deliverables. You can start looking at tasks which are indirectly robot related, like a team to shoot and edit the robot reveal video, a team responsible for running your team website or social media, a team dedicated to, I dunno, food prep for your meetings, social planning, business planning, marketing, fundraising, etc.

yea I guess I am 4 teams (I do the website, video, photos, and marketing basically alone)

[xXhunter47Xx]

Originally Posted by alyssa2485

This has been an issue that our team has been combating for years...a few years ago I think I remember starting off with 30 freshman and ending the season with 2. However, we've been working really hard on it and this year I think we started with around 25-30 freshman and have only lost about 5.

To combat this issue in the offseason, we meet about once a week for general meetings and updates, however, just about every weekend in the offseason we have either trainings happening for new members, or a community service event.

Joining a team can be more than intimidating for rookie members. All of the older students seem to know so much more, and mentors are terrifying. It's really easy to get lost in the shuffle. What our team does to combat this is a requirement that ever rookie member earn certifications in at least 2 domains of the team. For example, if a student wants to become certified in electronics, they go to 3-4 classes taught by the leadership student in charge of electronics, take an informal test and then are officially certified to work in that department during the season. Along with giving us a competent workforce come kickoff, the program allows rookie members to get involved and excited to do what they learned about.

Another thing is off season competitions. I can't stress this enough. My rookie year, I fell in love with robotics at Battle at the Border, by meeting new people and getting to see other robots. Off seasons really give students an idea for what they signed up for, and give them an idea of what they are working towards.

Funny you mentioned battle at the border, we were definitely gonna go and bring all the new members but our modifications to the robot didn't meet the deadline...

Off-season events do seem to be a common suggestion, and I definitely see how it helps bring in new members and "indoctrinate" them

[LisaGinkgo]

I agree with what most people have been saying about holding workshops for new members, maintaining a positive attitude, and trying to make sure that new members are engaged and feel able to contribute. Additionally, I think it's important to make rookies feel that they are a part of the team from the start. My team has older members talk to them and teach them, rather than leaving all of the instruction to mentors. Team-building activities can be great, but from my experience, it's really important to make sure that new members also get a chance to work with and learn from their teammates, as it allows them to get to know them better as well as showing them that the older members make mistakes and thus won't judge them for being confused or making mistakes themselves. We always try to emphasize that you don't need to know anything when you join the team and that all you need is to be willing to learn.

That said, different people are inspired in different ways. Some people feel most comfortable having someone helping them along and checking their work to start with (in which case we've found it's best to let them work with you--tell them what needs to get done and give them step-by-step instructions on how to do it and why each step is necessary if there's time), but others prefer to be more independent earlier on. My favorite memory from my freshman year was being assigned to build a prototype for a frisbee intake partway through Build Season. I was working with a bunch of other rookies, and we worked essentially on our own. Yes, we messed up a lot, but we also knew that what we were creating was being created by us, and that with every iteration, it got closer to becoming something that would work, which was something I don't think many of us had experienced before. It was some of the most fun I've ever had, and even though we never had time to actually use it, creating a mechanism that actually worked was one of the most inspiring things I had ever experienced. And inspiration and a sense that you're learning something seem to be the things that keep people on a team.

Because different people find different things inspiring, if possible, we've found that it works to have multiple types of activities open. We allow rookies to work with mentors or more experienced members if they want to, but also give them independent projects if they'd prefer that. People will eventually gravitate towards the areas and learning environments in which they feel most comfortable.

People like to feel like they're contributing to the robot. If you have a machine shop, the rookies on my team last year enjoyed fabrication. They didn't have to have a strong understanding of robotics in order to contribute, but they learned these concepts as they went because they usually ended up assembling the mechanisms they made, so they got to see how they worked. There were also immediate, tangible results when they worked, which I think helped.