My team has close to no dedication

[Sleepyrook]

Originally Posted by Alaina

hey all,

This year has been very difficult for me. I am the only student who has been on my team for more than one season. And even current seniors who were involved last year mainly helped at the end of the season, so they don't know a whole lot about building a robot.

I think I have about 6 new members who are the slightest bit enthusiastic about FIRST (they're all freshmen, so that kind of makes me optimistic for 2008, but that's not my point). I was the only upper-classman (out of 9) at my team's kickoff party. Then later some mentors showed up, and we strategized while the freshmen played video games.

It's not like I don't tell my team how the build season works. I send out at least 2 emails to the robotics list (yay for technology schools) every day. Whether we meet at lunch or after school most people don't show up. Yesterday we were supposed to have a brainstorming session yesterday and I was the only one there. It was extremely disappointing.

We currently don't have an engineering mentor. The engineer who owns our workspace is leaving on Monday to be in England for 3 weeks. I'm sure he'll let us access our workspace but it's going to be a struggle to get any good designs without an expert opinion. And it seems like my team just wants to sit around until he gets back!

What disappoints me the most is how my teachers don't want to spend any time outside of school to work on this. I thought they were here to help us?

A 3-day weekend is coming up and we'll only be meeting one of those days. I really wanted to have a running robot by the end of the weekend. But we can't do that because we don't have a) a workspace or b) adult supervision. On Monday we are going to use a kid's garage to work and that's it. Hopefully we'll get our workspace back by Wednesday.

How can I convince my team that I can't do this by myself? I want them to know what FIRST is and what build season is like, but it seems like none of them are interested enough. I hope you don't take this post the wrong way. What I've said here is definitely not a first thought. For anybody who has read all of this, I appreciate you 'listening' and hopefully you could give me some advice.

Have a good MLK weekend

-Alaina

Honestly, I think you're pittying yourself too much. Many times have no mentors, and no teacher assistance and the robots are built by a few dedicated indidividuals with most of the team coming and going as they please and only offering a bit of help. After leading a team 2 years and helping out a third, I realized the reason people don't show up is b/c they usually don't have anything to do or feel like they can't do it. If you can figure out a way to make people busy all the time and make them feel like they've accomplished something, they will usually stick around. In the long run though, you don't want people who aren't that excited about the whole proceess showing up b/c they just provide a distraction to the rest of the team.



In order to get around the lack of adult supervision, I had everyone sign agreements that essentially negaited the effects of having adult supervision, and if it's of any consolation, our "teacher sponsor" literally did nothing throughout the entire competition, he didn't even go to the local kickoff and every year we had to convince the people running it to let 2 kids to sign for the parts. Just know that it could be worse.

Also, having a running robot by the first weekend of the competition is probably a bad idea since it would have been designed/thoughtout all that well and completely *unless you're just talking about making the drive kit/chassis that came with the parts

Anyways, goodluck with inspiring the team. Lead by example, and don't schedule unneccsary and annoying meetings, b/c people would get tired of showing up and doing nothing.