Too large of a team?

[Bharat Nain]

Even though our team has never had that sort of crowd, I have helped teams who have gone thru that situation. Well, there are many options - people above me gave you some good advice. First, how many mentors[responsible and working] do you have? Second, how many student leaders do you have? The more responsible people you have on the team, the bigger of a team you can handle. What I would suggest is going back into the The Awards section and see how your team can participate in almost everything. Divide[create sub groups] the team accordingly. Now, some things are just not going to work out. You can choose to have an application process or something. Workshops and team get togethers are a great way to inspire students. Sometimes what you need to do is get to know some of the kids personally, you are going to find one winner who will love FIRST, it takes some effort. Anyways, my idea would be to give all the members 2 months on the team as grace period - make sure they know the different things they can do on the team. Then, after that you interview them and see who is responsible - who is useful - who is a just slacking off - who is useless - who is causing trouble. You definitely want to eliminate those causing trouble - it's up to you to see if you want to keep the slackers and such - depending on funds and whatever other factors you can think of. Every team is different. In many teams 20% of the kids do 80% of the work - so don't feel bad if you see too many kids not doing anything.

Go into the white papers section of CD and look thru all the white papers. Put together a handbook for your team. As I said there are many options, look to see what works best for you. Feel free to talk to me further if you need help.

[sanddrag]

This coming season (2006) is the strangest ever for getting new members on our team. (we just got them). We do have a rather formal application process, but when opened to the whole school (840 students in grades 9-11) for more than two weeks, all we got were 6 applications back. And 5 of the 6 are girls, how about that!?! So anyway, we let them all in. But if we got more than 6 applications, we would have said "sorry" to some of them. That was decided ahead of time. We will also be letting two freshmen join when they start in the fall. That's a total of 8 new members and a total of approximately 11 returning members.

On such a small team, the amount that each person gets out of it is just tremendous; I love it!

[KathieK]

First of al, congratulations for getting that many students interested in your team! Itmeans you are doing some awesome marketing and public relations!

If you haven't already done so, I suggest the team members (students and mentors) determine a number limit that is managable (on RAGE it was determined two years ago that the team could support 40 students with its resources; financial, mentor, space, etc.) where everyone who is on the team would get something out of it. Spend the summer writing up a team handbook which explains your number limit, the application process, and defines a date whereby you will no longer accept applications. It should also spell out the requirements of being on the team, attendance policies, contributing to the work of the team, etc. Some teams require X hours per week, X number of dollars raised for fundraising, plus maintain a high academic standing (I am on the fence about that requirement...) . Some teams require a fee upon application - this weeds out a lot of people but the fee is applied to the students' costs (t-shirts, travel, whatever), or requires that a student raise x number of dollars in sponsorships in order to join the team.

Establish a policy for who gets to travel (traveling and getting out of school are a lure for many students). Check with your school to see if you can implement these requirements (if your school acknowledges that you are a "team" like a sports team, then you can usually "weed out" people who are not contributing to the team; if your school defines you as a "club" then you may have to be inclusive of everyone who joins, but with established cutoffs, etc. you may be able to get around it).

Hold an Open House and make it mandatory that students and parents/guardians attend. Be clear about expectrations, time and financial committment. Explain this is not to scare them off, but to inform them so they can make a good decision if they want to join or not. Each applicant gets a copy of the handbook which they and a parent must sign.

If you follow procedures like this you will weed out the ones that are really not that interested.

I have also heard of the model where a team formed a separate marketing/spirit/artwork team to support the robotics team, almost like a booster club.

[Kims Robot]

The one thing I havent exactly heard here is starting a business team. We are going to have a business team that will take care of budgeting, watching over the fundraising, establishing & maintaining our handbook, student database (to record requirements fulfillment), a team newsletter, travel organization, and hopefully we are going to do a bunch of presentations & panels for the school that cover a range of business topics & things they will need for college.

We are doing an application this year, mostly just to collect needed info, as well as figure out what the students are interested so we can better get them involved. If the numbers get huge someday, it might be used to weed out, but only if we are out of resources to support it.

Other than that I will just quick list all the Subteam activities we have (some of them get lumped together since we are still a small team):
Mechanical, Fabrication, Electrical, Pneumatics, Programming, Webpage, Photo/Video, Spirit/Logo, Marketing, Awards, Community Service, Animation, Strategy/Drive/Rules, Business, Fundraising & Team Leadership.

I also like the idea mentioned here to take a look at all of the awards FIRST gives... not so much to win the awards, but just to get ideas of what your team could do for extra tasks. Take a look at the structure of some of the chairmans teams as well, you will likely get some ideas on more things you can do.

Good luck!

[Carol]

I realize that it is very easy to suggest splitting the team, but in reality money and resources can make that impossible, so I'll skip that. (Even with over 100 students you can easily tap out fundraising in an area).

If building and operating the robot is considered the "best" team, why don't you make it the ultimate goal for the students? For example, each student has to spend, say, their first year on fundraising and spirit, then their second year on Lego League, third year on BEST or VEX, then in their final year, those who stayed around and have shown the ability, can join the robot team. This of course would require a four year commitment so you may want to scale it down.

[santosh]

Sorry for th minor confusion about BEST. Our BEST team is a team that competes in another competition called BEST which stands for Boosting Engineering Sience and Technology. It is a smaller scale robotics competition.
Ok guys. We have 140 people expected actually more than that next year
in our club. We have a magnet program within our school and that is
where we get most of our students from. We only have 3 mentors from
our school and we work along side GT. In that number of 140+ GT is not
included.

We do have an application process which allows us to help move certain
people into certain teams. Each team has its own leader. Our business
team that was mentioned kind of is our promotion team and fundraising
team balled into one. Here is a break down of our club right now.

BEST Team= Participates in the building of the BEST robot. (9th and 10th)

Fundraising Committee= headed by the treasurer. The Fundraising Team
helps look for sponsorships. Schedule Fundraising events that the
entire team is supposed to help out with by attending (all grades).

Tech Team= designs trading cards, website handling, t-shirt graphics,
robot CAD, banner design, creates scouting Database, Runs the Cyber
Center, etc. (all grades)

Outreach Committee= schedules most of the outreach events. (All grades)

Scouting Team= takes part in scouting out other teams. Helps with team
spirit and promoting our team at competitions. (all grades)

Lego Team= Mentors Lego Teams twice a week. Helps teach at FLL work
shops. Will be responsible for starting Jr. Lego League teams in the
county. (All grades)

FIRST Team= this team designs and builds the FIRST robot. (11th and 12th)
WE are mentored by Georgia Tech. They help guide us when it comes to
the design of the robot and building it.

VEX Team= If we are picked will build the VEX robot and if not we
mentor the other teams because we had to build 17 of the demo vex bots
for nationals

Promotional team= promotes the team (no idea of what we really are
doing with this team)

2 FRC teams are most likely out of the question. We spent $52k this
year. And that was a lot. So I doubt we will have 2 teams. And there
are multiple teams in our county making it very hard to get money.

Our FRC team only consists of like 15 members. This helps us because
otherwise we would be killing ourselves with 140 people down there
trying to build.

We open our club to everyone in our school because we want everyone to
be able to experience robotics. All of our members who want to go on
trips can go on trips and this year, to be able to go on trips, you
have to attend a certain % of the meetings outreach events and
fundraising events.

We don't want a smaller team. We want a team that is more involved.
Last year with 80 something members we only had like 30 come to our
meetings.

Thank you guys so much for all of your input. Sorry for such a long post.
There are a few issues with our system and we are just trying to fix it.
That attendance% is lower than Shaq's ft %. I just want
everyone to some how stay interested. People join
robotics not knowing what robotics is all about. They want to build
and they don't understand that if they stay with the club, that they
will move to a build team.

[alphastryk]

we actually have only 3 mentors and 3 student executives. we also have a team leader for each team within our team.

for our FRC built team, we have Georgia Tech students to help mentor.

I would like to be able to give all the new members something to do, because this year about 25% of the people did 90% of the work.

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by santosh

People (stupid freshmen) join
robotics not knowing what robotics is all about.

I think this comment is totally inappropriate. I'd send some negative rep over your way, but I'd rather express my opinion on your comment publicly.

How are freshmen supposed to learn and supposed to be excited about the program when all they hear is "stupid freshmen"? What an insult. Very maliciously amateur if you ask me. How is that supposed to be Inspiring? IMHO that statement lies just on the edge of bullying, which is being targeted by lawmakers and school officials across the country. A comment like that leads me to believe that you and/or your team needs a big shift of values. If you think freshmen are stupid, that is your opinion but I point you to this list of reminder threads before you ever think about making another comment like that again.

Also, I believe you are making a big mistake by only allowing 11th and 12th grade on the FRC build team.

[santosh]

Well I am sorry for the quot you posted. It was a joke towards teh freshman who was with me while I was making the post. I didn't think about all th freshmen on the board that might have become offended. That comment in no way reflects what our club thinks or believes in.

We are realizing after this past year that 11th and 12th graders only on our FRC Build team is bad because 1/2 of our experience is lost which is why we are trying to think about letting sophmores and freshmen on. The thing about it is that our sophmores and Freshmen have not yet taken any of the AP Physics classes or Post AP Robotics. We try and use BEST robotics as a stepping stone towards FIRST so that freshmen and sophmores aren't overwhelmed by FIRST. Overwhelmed by the knowledge needed and the time commitment.

In regards to another previous question, we are only 1 school.

[Beth Sweet]

Originally Posted by santosh

People (stupid freshmen) join
robotics not knowing what robotics is all about. They want to build
and they don't understand that if they stay with the club, that they
will move to a build team.

Santosh,

As an older member on your team, you are the one in charge of teaching them what it's about. While I know that you apologized above for your comment, I want to remind you that a big part of FIRST is to educate everyone, even those "stupid freshmen" about science and technology. Yes, you were trying to make a joke, and that's fine, however, you really need to watch what you say if you want people to take it correctly. That's part of the problems with typing, not enough emotional expression.

As to the part about not wanting to decrease your team size, the issue that you are experiencing occurs with every team no matter what the size. There will always be people who want to be active and there will always be those who are in it to see what they can get. As to making the others more dedicated? Well, that is one somewhat negative thing about our competition. There is a limited amount of work that can be done and a limited number of people that can do it. Perfect project management would allow the maximum number of people to do the maximum amount of work to stay productive, but sometimes, there's just not enough for everyone to do. Keep everyone as busy as you can, and if they choose not to be active, don't give up on them, just keep working with them. Maybe next year they'll change their thoughts when they see how much those who participated actively got out of it. And here's one quick hint that some people don't want you to know. There are some people that, no matter what, FIRST just won't make a difference for. There are some who won't be affected. So just try to make them have as much fun as they can, while they are with the team.

[stealth13777]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I think this comment is totally inappropriate. I'd send some negative rep over your way, but I'd rather express my opinion on your comment publicly.

How are freshmen supposed to learn and supposed to be excited about the program when all they hear is "stupid freshmen"? What an insult. Very maliciously amateur if you ask me. How is that supposed to be Inspiring? IMHO that statement lies just on the edge of bullying, which is being targeted by lawmakers and school officials across the country. A comment like that leads me to believe that you and/or your team needs a big shift of values. If you think freshmen are stupid, that is your opinion but I point you to this list of reminder threads before you ever think about making another comment like that again.

Also, I believe you are making a big mistake by only allowing 11th and 12th grade on the FRC build team.

First of all, we had a freshman on the team last year and two sophomores this year, while our BEST team was all freshman and sophomores. We base the team ppl are on by their prior experience, knowledge, and why they tell us they want to be on a team. Sorry again for the stupid freshman comment, that was inappropriate. The fact is, when people sign up for robotics for the first time, they often dont know the extra commitment it takes compared to many of the other clubs at our school. After freshmen year, people join the club based more on what their friends tell them about it and what they see then just the name "Robotics". Freshmen dont hav this opportunity to find out about the club b/c they are just coming into the school. I can say this b/c when I was a freshmen I had no idea what I was getting into when i signed up, but the commitment was no problem for me, i enjoy this stuff, so I stayed on and as a sophomore this year I made the First build team.

By the way, we use the clubs as stepping stones, lego in middle school, Best 9th and 10th, then First (although u can go straight to first if u show the qualities needed). The fact is, we dont hav enough room to just put ppl on our First build team, everyone has a big job and they have to know how to do their job or the robot will not work, period. To put someone on First before theyre ready would be pointless when we hav other Build teams that can prepare them for the First build team so well. I dont know where ur hate or upsetment over such small misunderstandings, but I hope u wont make the same misjudgements in the future, b/c that kind of stuff hurts everyone involved in first robotics and really everyone period.

[Bharat Nain]

Originally Posted by santosh

Thank you guys so much for all of your input. Sorry for such a long post.
There are a few issues with our system and we are just trying to fix it.
That attendance% is lower than Shaq's ft %. I just want
everyone to some how stay interested. People join
robotics not knowing what robotics is all about. They want to build
and they don't understand that if they stay with the club, that they
will move to a build team.

Well, that's normal. If some of these kids leave the team, it's probably for the good. If you have 15 productive FRC members then you're probably doing great. It looks like your team is put into strong sub-groups and is productive.Your organization looks fine, the team operations looks fine... I think you're set. Some committees (like fund-raising) might need to work harder than others because of the size of the team, but that's just the way things are.

[alphastryk]

We do allow students of all ages to join FIRST, if they show that they have experience. for example, I joined our FRC team as a freshman, and im still there now as a Senior.

the club has grown a lot since then, though.

we need someone to do the other parts, even if few want to. if they prove they are willing to work andcan commit the time for FRC, then they can do it.

[Jizvonius]

Hi, I'm one of the surprisingly few GT students working with the team. Despite what people may think about GT, being that it is a Tech school, our numbers are surprisingly low. We only have about 10 college mentors working with the FIRST team, and 2 of those were recent grads from Wheeler.

The great thing about this team is that by growing the FIRST team through Wheeler, we grow our robotics team at Tech. It has been working out pretty well so far, but as far as the GT side goes, our problem is money, space, and experience. We have more than enough ideas to occupy everyone, but not enough money to buy parts, not enough experience to have leaders for every project, and certainly not enough space to work on so many projects. We are trying to work more off-season to give more experience to the high school leaders, hopefully so that it will trickle down and benefit the whole team. If I had to work with all of the students, my head would explode.

Jevawn Roberts
Co-Leader GTFIRST
President RoboJackets