Number of students on your team

[Grogrey]

I was wondering how many students you have on your team. My team currently has 28 but last year we had 15, so I'm curious what's average for an FRC team.

[asid61]

I think we have around 50 active members. On paper we have more than 100 IIRC.

[Koko Ed]

We have about 50 at the moment but many will drop off as the year goes on. We're usually at 25 to 30 by year's end.

[Chak]

How would you make sure that teams don't accidentally vote multiple times? I voted, but I'm worried that someone else from my team would answer this question a second time and mess up your results.

Edit: Now they won't, since this post is here

[Grogrey]

Originally Posted by Chak

How would you make sure that teams don't accidentally vote multiple times? I voted, but I'm worried that someone else from my team would answer this question a second time and mess up your results.

Edit: Now they won't, since this post is here

If they do, then it just shows that the team has more students. I guess.

[Mark McLeod]

A 2011 Brandeis random sampling survey study found 22.7 students per team on average.

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by Grogrey

If they do, then it just shows that the team has more students. I guess.

It would artificially reflect that more teams have that number of students.

My previous team had right around 20 students that actually showed up. We then started a new community based team and had about 10 of those students jump over; several had to drop out early on due to scheduling conflicts. We had an an lnflux of new students and still get inquiries; the team is sitting at around 26 students now.

I really hate to see students leave but we did have a student who tried a couple of subteams and decided the team wasn't a good fit. There will probably be others who start to lay low once build season starts and they realize how busy it will get. But on the whole, considering we have done no active recruiting, we are pleased at how well received our team has been.

[teku14]

What a pleasant normal distribution that is forming in the polls

[AmiableVariable]

Originally Posted by GreyingJay

It would artificially reflect that more teams have that number of students.

This definitely happened with at least the 36- 45 range. I figured out how to check after voting and reading the thread and am the third person from my team to vote in the poll. That number is inflated by 2 from that alone.

We have 40-odd students right now, which is the biggest our team has ever been. Approximately 20 of us are seniors, so that total should drop next year. Last year, the total number of students was around 35, and our first year (2013) we had somewhere around 25 students.

[Sperkowsky]

Our team is at around 40 members who come at least once a week.
Out of those 40 - 30 come 2-3 times and week and 10 come every day.

Because we completed an entire full length mock build season we got rid of most of the "Dropoff members earlier"

We are happy with where we are and I cant imagine trying to manage 90+ students.

Considering we started the year with 8 members its going good.

[cbale2000]

We have about 4 active members (come to almost every meeting), and ~3 who are part-time (show up to 1 or 2 meetings in a month). Needless to say our recruiting efforts have not gone well...

[Libby K]

Almost 120 on the roster (paid their dues, are considered a member of the organization).

In order to travel to events with us, they've gotta get in their hours and work really hard during both the build season and the off-season. We'd travel with 120 if they all met their requirements, but so far we end up with between 40-75 kids on any given trip.

[bigbeezy]

We've been growing substantially the past few years. Up from mid 30s in 2013 to last fall having 96 students but that quickly fell off to about 60. This year we created 3 FTC teams to bear some of that load. We currently have 62 FRC and 37 FTC students, tho some have dropped already.

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Libby K

Almost 120 on the roster (paid their dues, are considered a member of the organization).

In order to travel to events with us, they've gotta get in their hours and work really hard during both the build season and the off-season. We'd travel with 120 if they all met their requirements, but so far we end up with between 40-75 kids on any given trip.

Wow... I can't imagine having that many kids on my team... It would be about 1/3 of the school!

[Libby K]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

Wow... I can't imagine having that many kids on my team... It would be about 1/3 of the school!

We're not quite THAT saturated - each of our district high schools has (according to wikipedia, because I couldn't remember) has about 1600 students, and we pull from both. I can't imagine managing 1/3 of that!

I think what works for us is that 'registering' as a team member doesn't necessarily mean that you're super active. All team members are, of course, invited to participate in all activities - and if you plan on traveling with us, there are plenty of things you MUST do - but we recognize that there are students who just want to put "yeah, I was on the robotics team" on their resume.

With the small mentor base that we have, it's just not worth our time to try and fight that. Instead, we say "Sure! You can register!" and if the student doesn't motivate themselves to get further involved, then all they did was pay $300 for a t-shirt and a line on their resume. As mentors, we will open every door for you, but you've gotta take at least one step through. We'd rather spend our time cultivating the students who sign up, show up, and work really dang hard. (Which, as I said, in our case is still around 75 students.)