What does everyone do about large members involvement?

[ngreen]

My best advice is to avoid making it a task and try making is something fun that they enjoy. Overplay being a team and underplay the robotics. Give them task that will produce accomplishments. I can not remember how many positive comments our team received from our i-movie and scrapbook last year. The persons who took on this responsibility were able to build something that got just as much praise as our robot.

It is about meeting a person's needs. You almost need a team phychologist to ensure people needs are met. We would but he would tell us all we were nuts (6 weeks of late nights and caffeniated beverages). I'm sure a lot of you have heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This goes from physiological needs: offer pizza and large amount of carbonated beverages, to safety needs: wear your safety glasses, don't jab people with sharp object, ie, "If you jab me one more time I'm not coming back." Hopefully you can meet the first two. The rest start getting harder.

Belonginess: This is definitely an issue. Make everyone on the team feel like they belong. To feel like you belong you must have a productive job on the team. If you sit around while everyone else does something you are not going to feel like you belong and going to think that robotics sucks. It is the mentors and students job to foster a sense of belonginess. If you see someone without a job, take them and teach them something new so they can belong.

Esteem: When people finish that long ardous job they want a little praise for it. It is human nature. That is why people should always post positive comments about people robots on here. People need that praise even if it comes with some improvement ideas. Another way to gain esteem goes with mastery of a skill. You can give a sense of belonginess and instill esteem by teaching someone something new. Think how awesome it feels when you learn or think of something new and you get positive feedback. This is meeting your esteem needs.

Self-actualization: This is the hard one to define and show how you can do it. More or less it means to get that person to be excited and addicted so that they want to do their best and then improve on it. A "To make the best better" kind of thing for you 4-H students out there. People who are self-actualize are the people that are excited to wake up in the morning, the one who will stay to 3 in the morning to finish a task, and who show up to meetings wanting to do as much as they can. It is hard to explain how to meet this need, but it starts by meeting all of the previous needs.

Okay. That was all I had to say. I hope you at least apply some of this to your team. It might not help to make more task but it will make every one of your team better. I'd say start with the physiological needs, yum.

Honestly, I always thought the same thing you do. We have about 20 kids I would say...and we really all do robot related things. Obvoiusly, some people do a lot more work than others. Some come, and don't even get that much work done. However, in our facility (Ex-Cell-O) we need a "buddy" when we use a tool to cut a part (good safety procedure anyway) so it always is helpful to have extra people around to be buddies.
In general, I guess people choose if they want to design, or just build parts... or mainly strategize... but we honestly don't do very much fundraising or any of the spirit stuff.
Maybe we should...

Ellen

[The Lucas]

We can handle more kids on the team this year (above our normal 35) because we now have a full fledged videography team that documents everything we do. We have like 200 tapes. Soon they will start editing this mound of footage into a series of cable public access shows.

Other full time teams that do not work on the bot do things like Animation team and Web team. Chairmans award team is also a good idea if you want to try to win that award. Other teams like building a mascot and making buttons are mostly part-time teams around competition season.

[mrs. p]

i started our team in 1999 and we have learned as the years go by. we usually have a group of about 40 - 55 students that want to be on the team and i agree that finding tasks or jobs for all to feel involved is sometimes challenging as a mentor. as previously mentioned we have a number of groups.

chairman's award
spirit team
animation
web page
driver/human player
field construction
base design
control system
electrical system
arm/manipulator design
project management
scouting
lego league

while everyone cannot be directly involved in the building of the robot every other aspect of the team is needed. to ensure that all of these areas are covered we have a minimum number of hours that students must complete in order to attend specific competitions. through school presentations and word of mouth, students that are not interested in building a robot come forward.

let me know if you want any further specifics.

[Koko Ed]

We have had some teams as large as 50+ kids but have found that it is most efficnt with about 40 kids at the most. We have 32 kids this year (started out with 35) here is how they are divided up.

Model Shop - Parts & Fabrication (2 kids)

Mech 1 - Elevation (5 kids)

Mech 2 - Acquisition (6 kids)

Mech 3 - Drives (5 kids)

PAW - Promotions, Animation and Web Design (7 kids diveded amongst three teams)

Sparkies - Electrical Team (4 kids)

uh oh! That's only 29! We're missing 3 kids on the webpage! D'oh!)

Other assignmetns are for team spirit (Prince or Princess of Positive Propoganda), Driver, Coach and Human player (of course), treasurer, Scout leader, even for Team Mascot.

Thanks -- these are all great ideas! We'll have to think about how to attract kids that aren't specifically interested in building the robot. I'd especially like to see us tap into a talent pool that can help with spirit...