Attendance/Scheduling Software

[Jon Stratis]

We just use Google sheets - a simple spreadsheet with all the students and all our meetings dates on it. For convenience, we have it printed out per subteam and posted near where the subteam meets - the mentors then can fill it out at the end of each meeting (more or less), and copy it into the spreadsheet once a week or so.

For us, we use it to help determine who gets to travel (50% attendance required) and who gets to letter (80% attendance required, in addition to other items). We play a little loose with those numbers, too... We've often made sufficient argument to give someone a letter when they were a couple points short, depending on the circumstances. One year, for example, there was a choir trip that several students attended during week 0, which caused them to miss out on about 2 normal weeks worth of the build season. It's less about meeting the specific number than it is contributing to the team... but to contribute you have to be at the meetings, and providing the students with those numbers helps to set the expectation for their level of contribution better than a vague statement trying to define how "contribution" is actually measured.