How do you organize your team?

[NoodleKnight]

Thanks for your help guys.

The problem with being a team made up of two schools is that you can't remind those people who are at the other school. Woodside High school was the original school, but oddly enough, two of the leaders come from Carlmont High school.

For a long time we've always accepted all those who show interest in robotics, and usually time will weed out those who can't dedicate themselves to this kind of work and usually, our team boils down to around 20 members. And about that one kid, we've tried many things to try and fix him up, but it never works, he's just to stuck-up. What's worse is that we can't kick people off the team, we have to "ask" them to leave, indirectly. And frankly, he's just too stupid to realise that he isn't wanted on the team.

The idea of having a required amount of service hours and fundraising hours seems like a good idea, but how would you prove if the person was lying or not? Also, we kind of try and stay away from giving out tests and all, robotics is supposed to be fun, not another event where you have to worry about tests. The attendence/star-chart idea seems really good, every meeting we take attendance but never use the attendence records for anything.

Eventually the team does resolve its problems, but only when we're extremely short on time. We try to motivate the team to be proactive, but they usually don't care until its one week before build season, or even robot ship date. I know the team is capable of doing great things, its just that they lack motivation, even during the mid-build season, people just rush through their work doing a really poor quality job.

Again, thanks for the help guys, we've never had to revert to threats to drive the team forward, but after loosing all of our seniors during 2003-2004, these new rookies act like they know everything and don't have to do anything. Our multiple attempts to motivate them isn't quite working, maybe selecting those to go get to work on the robot and go to the competitions will.