Pros/Cons for making our Robotics Team selective?

[sgeckler]

Gus,

How long did your try out last from beginning to end?

Sam

[Brian Maher]

Originally Posted by DonShaw

We have many students who do not actively participate but at times come out of the blue with a great a concept, so why would you want to stifle that? I feel it may take some kids three years to come out of their shell before they get really active.

This is exactly what happened to me. My freshman and sophomore years, I was not exactly the most active contributor to my team. However, my junior year, something clicked in my head and I realized that I wanted to make a difference on my team. I threw myself into my work on 1257, co-founding and co-leading our Strategy/Scouting subteam, leading the team at-large as president, and doing a bunch of other things across the team.

Some kids take longer than others to express talent. Just being with the team at the right time can allow this talent to expressed. Selectivity should be employed when the number of students becomes a detriment to the impact of the program.

[KathieK]

If your team is affiliated with a school system, check to see if it is considered to be a "team" or a "club." Often these definitions will decide whether or not you can consider being selective. A "team" sometimes has to hire/pay a stipend to a coach/teacher. It may be able to have tryouts. It might have to join an athletics conference and follow their rules. An after-school "club" might be "looser" in terms of restrictions, but may have to be open to everyone who is interested. And there are "pay-to-play" stipulations in some school districts also. It gets complicated but speaking from experience, it's a good thing to have this defined before any issues arise.

[zachrobo1]

Over the last year, 1002 has been thinking about how to address this problem. One one hand, you want to involve everyone who wants to, but on the other hand you want quality, dedicated people to be on your team.

This year we are trying a new interest group system to try to solve this problem. When anyone joins CircuitRunners, they get to choose an interest group (fabrication, design, programming, electrical, and management). Interest groups meet once a week and allow students to explore these concepts in the context of robotics. Students can propose robotic/tech projects and receive funding and mentoring for their projects. This allows everyone to be able to experience our culture without putting them in a competitive setting.

We then have an application system for students to apply for competition teams (BEST, FTC, offseason FRC, and FRC) if they choose to do so (and most do!). This means that we can be a bit more selective with our competition teams while still allowing as many kids to be involved as possible. So far, its worked great. I compared retention numbers, and we are seeing a 30 member increase (~70% from last year) in people still engaged weekly so far!

[JesseK]

The way we've addressed and (kinda, but not fully) solved the student engagement problem is to setup a student leadership structure for the 60-ish FRC kids. The kids and the adults work together to run the team like a tech company, and the student leaders are responsible for making sure the peers in the respective groups have work to do. The leaders came up with an interesting 'lives' concept, where students gain/lose lives based upon attendance and critical work executed. With this system, it looks like we're going to lose a few kids before the build season even starts if they don't turn it around.

From there the adults teach, co-op in execution and mediate.

Unfortunately we've had to turn away some very motivated underclassmen, but there's so much available for them to do other than FRC in our program we try to find ways to keep them interested longer-term. Some of them just show up during build season anyways, which then becomes a source of contention (seriously, there's only so much space, peer-helping-while-producing and mentor attention span). We've addressed this historically by allowing them to be in an observational role only, and then the next year they're fully-involved. Oh, and I almost forgot - the grants we wrote to get extra machinery (CNC, 3D printers) have provided an entirely new avenue to recruit mentors to teach students stuff in, so we were able to up the team capacity a bit over the last couple of years. Some of the CAM/CNC work is a bit repetitive (only CNC plates at the moment) but it gets them in the door and into the longer-term experience.

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by sgeckler

Gus,

How long did your try out last from beginning to end?

Sam

Our first year, we went on for about four weeks; far too long. This year, we had one Saturday morning (we did an FLL fast start that afternoon), Two Monday evenings, one Thursday evening, and one six-hour Saturday, a total of about 16 hours. Those trying out did not have to be there the whole way through, as we ran it in stations; they only had to get through all of them. One highly motivated prospect started late and did about 90% on the full Saturday. Next year it will probably be a bit shorter than this year, probably more like 12 hours. The important thing is to have each station be short enough or allow enough people to do them simultaneously that you don't have one or two stations that everyone is waiting on.

[kd008702]

Sorry for the long rambling post, maybe you can get something from it(I hope).

For the last 3 years our team has been selective, not by choice but because of necessity. We started 9 years ago with 7 students 1 high school, we now have all 8 county high schools, 2 private schools , and home schoolers involved in our program. We had 176 students go out for the team this year. We have gotten so big that we started a 2nd team to keep more students involved. We take about 35 students per team. We have a selection process that starts in September and goes thru November. This is all in the student manual, that the students must sign along with the parents signature. We only meet 1 night a week from September to November. We drop students that don't show up after 3 meetings. Then we start looking at student participation during the meetings, we also look and see who is coming out to our out reach programs (We have something going on at least once thru the week and every weekend we have something going on) This year alone i have 6 veterans that are well below the cut off mark and will not be making the team because the could not commit. Its a tough decision and unfortunate one, but because of mentor resources it is just not safe to take on more students.
It's not about taking the best of the best, it's about taking the ones that are willing to commit the time and effort now not just latter. We find that the ones that make the commitment now actually work harder and better when the real fun starts.
In the end if you do go selective, put out the information for what you are looking for in the students, put it in writing because there will be parents that are going to complain about their supper dupper student not making the teh team and will want to know why. As in all things document, document and document.

[Gdeaver]

On the subject of selectivity. I want to bring up a subject that has and is currently causing big problems for our team. What do teams do about students that apply that have "special needs". We are a private team and we as mentors simply can not handle the needs of some of the students that have been on our team. Last year our inability to handle one student almost destroyed our team. This year our FTC team some how ended up with half the students being in this category. We tried putting questions on the application. Parents lied. Parents of these children tend to be of the steam roller type. I believe the current situation in the school district forces these parent to become very demanding and combative to get the school system to deal with their child. They carry this over to their interactions with our team. We have a good group of mentor and I feel that every year we give students a great experience. However, we are not trained special education educators and I do not volunteer my valuable time to be a baby sitter. The time during meeting that I have to spend to keep control of certain students is detracting my time from the other students. It's not fair. We can't be the only team facing this. How do other team deal with this problem?

[Jessi Kaestle]

Originally Posted by Gdeaver

What do teams do about students that apply that have "special needs".

First I want to preface my advice by saying that every school, student, team, and mentor is different. This is what I have found works when I have been in that situation but this might not work for you.

• If you are associated with a school*, check how their IEP (Individual Education Plan) Program works. So to allow the students to be as included as possible most IEP’s have a section to address how the student will participate in extra-curricular activities. In the past I have seen this in the form of the school needing to provide a faculty member trained in special education to the meetings. (*Private schools are not required to provide IEP’s)
• If the IEP does not cover your meeting, see if you can pair each of the special needs students with a more senior team member to be their buddy.
• You can also ask the parents if they would be able to come to the meeting to help ground their child(ren)

I understand that special needs students provide additional challenges, however those students are often greatly benefited by this program, so in my opinion, all avenues should be exhausted before barring a special needs students from the team.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Jessi Kaestle

I understand that special needs students provide additional challenges, however those students are often greatly benefited by this program, so in my opinion, all avenues should be exhausted before barring a special needs students from the team.

THIS.

I can think of at least two teams that are or were almost entirely special-needs students. That's just how their schools are set up--and from what I've heard from one of those coaches, this program is one of the best things they've done in a while. (One of the two, I didn't even notice until they told me.)

[philso]

Originally Posted by Jessi Kaestle

I understand that special needs students provide additional challenges, however those students are often greatly benefited by this program, so in my opinion, all avenues should be exhausted before barring a special needs students from the team.

We had one student the last two seasons, at least, who had some sort of physical difficulties (maybe from childhood polio?). He was not able to do the things that needed fine motor control like drive the robot nor was he able to work on the wiring. It was great to see that the team members "just accepted" him and treated him "normally" without being told to do so. They listened to his ideas when designing and building the robot. The only accommodation they made for him was that someone would always stay with him when we had to walk a long distance to make sure he did not get left behind. He would help pack for tournaments and he would help clean up at the end of the day. There were occasions where we could have him clamp some pieces in the drill press and have him drill the holes or have him turn a wrench. His smiles on these occasions made it all worth while :-)