How do you keep your FIRST team a TEAM?

[JonBell]

Originally Posted by Validius

lol, the joke on our tem is that we have to buy the (1)programmer food because "if you dont keep the fat programmer fat he might get some dignity and walk off"

Hey, you're the one with the CCNP

But on a more serious note, I would suggest that rather than putting a minimum on hours of commitment, you try to make sure that everyone has a role. I am a strong believer in micromanagement, and that if everyone has a task to do which they enjoy, they will do it. Try to define a specific task (especially for these drifters), and stress not that they have to do it just to call themselves part of the team, but that you only have less than 6 weeks, and need a robot at the end. I find that in general this technique works fairly well, and you'll be able to tell after the first week or so (ask for status reports) who is and isn't doing their job. If they aren't, perhaps that would be a good time to start pushing them as to if they really are commited to the team, because this job needs to be done. Hopefully at this point if they won't do it, they'll come out and say so and just leave the team.

But then of course you have people like me who don't find out that your school has a robotics team and needs a programmer until the last week, completely destroying the entire system, but whatever

We have a few on our team like you described (who I think were outside smoking the entire time), and it's really a shame, and something that I'd like to try and work on next year for our team.

On another note, when do you start work with your team?
I think that next year we're going to start first thing in september, breaking into subgroups, making proof of concepts, general design sketches, practicing, etc. I think that this will really help to 1: Get us more organized for when the competition starts, 2: Unite us better, because we'll have been working together for far longer, and finally, that the people who are just temporarily lured in will drop out by then.

But that's just my two cents...