Team Organization and Recruiting

[Jessica Boucher]

First of all, what will your number be without those seniors? Is it 27 or is it less? It changes your recruiting if you're closer to capacity. You may want to ask the applicants to submit some sort of application, in varying degrees of complexity (it could be anywhere from a paragraph as to why they want to be on the team to a full-blown application). The alternative is to accept anyone on the team that wants to join, coupled with the truth that not everyone will go to Atlanta...but I suggest that this would need some sort of evaluation process implemented.

And from how I understand it, it's not that you want to deprive anyone of the experience, but it's more of dealing with the issue that you can only provide for 35 at this moment in time and you want to give that to the students who are more likely to get more out of it (assuming that the people who put in the most work is because they are the most interested). Just to clarify, in "providing" for a student, does that mean they go for free? Or does this team they are allowed to go, but still have to fork over some money at the end? That changes things as well

There are many ways that you can "weed" out students. I've heard of point systems, report cards, 360-degree analyses, and the like. But in the end, it's all about using what's best for your team. With these seniors, are you losing a lot of your student leadership/management? Do you have a student/some students in place for when the seniors leave, or is it unnecessary? I'd love to know more about your team's specific structure. Which system will work best will depend on the time that the management can put in to compile the results.

Mind you, you may not find that thing that works best on the first try...it may take multiple instances before something really sticks. So just like the robot, don't be afraid of trial and error when it comes to managing your team!

I know there's a lot of variables, and I'm not answering much in this post, but it can be worked out pretty quickly with some brainstorming. Please PM me if you'd like to talk more about this.

Good luck!
-Jessica B

[Bcahn836]

We keep track of how many hours each person puts in. As soon as they walk in the door they sign in date and time. The most dedicated and the ones with the most hours and that want to go on a trip can go. But we do not elminate people because they don't pull their weight. They may have the hours but we also look at effort. And if they are doing nothing when their is alot to do then we ask them to leave. ( beside the usual break).
We have no limit when it comes to members but we do have standards. As far as recruting our team advertises in the three high schools and a few middle schools about what we do. When school starts the veteren members ,with the guidence of the mentors, take control and find out what each newbie is interested in and puts them in a training course. If they do not like that specialized area they can switch into a different one untill they become comfortable. This years project during the off season is to build a new cart which will include all of our subteams to build.

[phrontist]

Hmmm... two words man:

Peer Pressure

It works wonders. If the majority of the people are pulling their weight, and see some leech goofing off, make it a commonly accepted practice to ostracize them. The problem will promptly solve itself. No one wants The Man telling them what to do! If their friends make it clear that what they are doing in unacceptable, they'll change in a hurry.

Just mold your team's social dynamics, and remember that kids ridiculing one another can be a good thing at times. Make slacking off taboo!

That said, I must say we are a very small team where most want to work hard. We are fairly relaxed and tolerate some good natured time wasting, but everyone is quick to jump one another if it gets out of hand.

The real danger I could forsee would be a small faction of people united in their slacking. You've really got a problem if this happens. I've never seen this on robotics, but its happened on stagecrew occasionally (and I was usually part of the problem )

[Mike M.]

Well on my team we don't have a limit of the number of students that can join the team. The thing that I think weeds out the most people is our annual preseason mini-FIRST bridge building competition this seems to show all of our students what the whole program is like because we run it like a real FIRST competition with a common kit of parts, judges, and such. But we also have somewhat strict requirements for making our travel team. Each student has to raise $100 in fundraising, have a certain amount of hours (the adults that work with those students decide if those are quality hours or not), we also in teams of 3 or 4 students have to go out into the community and present the program to local businesses to get their financial support of the team, and keep up our grades. This year out of our 42 students we had 35 of them make the travel team, and we are losing 7 seniors. We really don't do a whole lot of recruiting but we do put on a little demo during the lunches before the season to bring about awareness of the program.

On the matter of keeping students on task we had a problem with this so we had an all student meeting to let the whole student part of the team what was going on and that if there was nothing to do go talk to one of the adults to see if they had anything to do even if its as little a job as designing a button or a huge undertaking like getting a system built it is still an important one.

We also have a FIRST student council that will deal with some of these types of problems and they also provide a link between the students and the adults. They are 5 students one from each class and one that represents all classes, they are elected reps.

ok but enough of my rambling this is just my $0.02

Yay my 100th post