How to deal with lack of participation

[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.