Hours spent during build season

[Drew_trak]

Hello,
This year was a big transition year for team 599 as our main coach moved up North. Due to this shift, our build season schedule was different and moved around so we struggled as a team to finish on time. I was wondering if any team has an approximation of how many hours or any other reference as to how much time they put in this build season. We would love to see how much time other teams are putting in. Thank you - see you at the competitions!

[MaGiC_PiKaChU]

Our shop was open every single day, often until 10-11PM with some days past midnight during the last days

[bookworm0422]

I did the math last night before we bagged the robot. I as a mentor with our build schedule for Team 313 put in almost 230 hours of time. Several other high level Mentors and 7 of my Students put in the same amount of time. That time does not include the 40 hours of work each week. It was crazy.

[GeeTwo]

We had nominal shop hours of 15.5 hours per week. We did work a bit of overtime, but probably not more than about 20 per week average, so probably 120-140 shop hours. Number crunching, purchases, and such away from the shop about doubled that for me.

[Mr. Ackroyd]

We put up an aggressive schedule this year and wanted to have the programmers given enough time on the robot as possible. It worked out as they had a full week of program testing while mechanical would work at the same time. This resulted in the programmers and drivers having three days of drive time and refining code.

This in hours for me as a mentor was around 250 hours. I had to be there at any point a student was in the shop. The kids averaged 150-200 hours. We also met pre season and put in another 112 hours. This was spent mentoring FTC and FLL teams. Hosting an FLL tournament and Robot Rumble (FRC) off season event.

We begin again tonight until our first competition at week four.

[Type]

I know the team stayed atleast from 4pm to 8pm every night so we atleast put in a total of 120 hours. We we put in a decent amount of overtime, and work on the weekends so I believe we worked atleast a total of 160 hours.

[RAGTOPSTANG]

This entire build Season was insane for our team. Keeping a log, I found that I spent approximately 415 hours working on the robot this year. There were only three days where I put in less than four hours, and I averaged 9.9 hours per day. However, there were some on my team who were able (somehow) to put in much more time.

[mastachyra]

I don't know how you guys do it. The highest hours on my team was 111 hours (aside from my 191 hours). I had parents complaining left and right that their daughters were spending too much time at robotics!

The total on our robot was 1250 hours. (we have a very small team)

400 hours is insane!

[maxnz]

My team spent about 89 hours working on the robot (including planning) + 6 hours at a week zero event + about 20 hours of me working during my study hall hour

[JesseK]

The kids were there most days after school when the mentors weren't, from 2-5pm at least.

Mentors & kids were there 2pm-10pm Thursday, 7am-7pm Saturday and 8am-6pm Sunday. In a typical year, there is also President's day, which is 12 hours of time. CAD happened with myself and a couple of students during the week as well, but from home. CAD was usually 4 extra hours a night Saturday-Wednesday. We took Fridays off.

Week 6 had 16 hours on Saturday and 16 hours on Sunday.

Subtract out 2 Thursdays, 1 Saturday, 1 Sunday and President's day due to snow.

[vhcook]

I think we had around 150 hours of official open shop time.

[EOC]

From kickoff to bag and tag our students logged 2550 hours,
Mentors 400 hours.

[marccenter]

Dear CD,

Kickoff (4 hours) and Kettering Day after Kickoff (10 hours) plus 88 hours of shop time at school == 102 total possible hours per student by bag day.

We have two coaches that split weekdays Mon- Tues from 6 to 9 and Wed -Thurs 6 to 9 pm. Saturdays are 9 am to 3 pm. No meetings on Friday (date night) and Sunday (church and family day).

During the first few weeks of the season we typically meet only 2 hours for week days and 3 hours on Saturdays until parts arrive and the design is mature enough to keep working on.

This year we took four weeks to complete the running chassis, a full two weeks longer than past years which required small changes to KOP chassis.

We began using a computer log on system this year for the students. The system was not perfect but we logged 773 hours for 20 students or about 40 hours average shop time per student. Adding the MEZ kickoff and Kettering Day After Kickoff we log nearly 1000 student hours for two teams of 10 students for two robots.

This year Royal RoboRavens1 (1188) and RoboRavens2 (3548) completed both robots and a third practice robot that is incomplete.

Due to our lower time quantity (via typical student commitment) we target building a robust, minimum competitive robot (no shooter, no hanging mechanism) and find that we can usually meet that objective (One of my sayings in the workshop is that time is our enemy and we need to finish early to allow programming time and drive team practice).

One of our mentors spent nearly 100% of his time with a few students building all the wooden game field pieces.

My hat is off to all students and mentors who can commit to having more hours in the build period to work on your robot.

Personally my wife finds my commitment very disruptive to our relationship so using more time for the robot team is not practical. I am very happy that the RoboRavens#1 (1188) coach and I build together allowing us to make both of our work and personal issues more manageable.

[Libby K]

Team meeting hours:
6-10pm Monday-Friday (Monday has a break for our all-hands team meeting)
9am-7pm Saturday - or later if we need it, last 3 weeks we went to 10pm
10am-6pm Sunday.

Our student leaders & the locally-based mentors are there every day. "Regular" students are usually on alternating days, and in shifts on weekends - we break up work far beyond just subteams, so everyone knows when 'their day' is ahead of time - and some of the 'distance mentors', myself included, are only around for Fri-Sun.

& that's just build season...

[kmodos]

I'm not sure on team totals, but several of our individual students and mentors hit over 200hrs. I know I personally spent 115hrs just during break (2/13-2/21), with anywhere from 20-30hrs a week for other weeks. As a team, we probably hit 2500+ total man hours.