Young Leaders in FIRST

[Alex Cormier]

To all the young leaders in FRC, FVC and FLL:

What are some of the problems you have faced during your time?

I have started a FVC team and helped start a FLL team.

One of the problems with the FVC is getting attention to the team and attracting team members. I brought in my vex robot and the 2003 robot borrowed from 1126 to lunches one day and still didn't attract any students. I do have 2 students that returned form the first meeting and they are loyal to the team and excited.

The purpose of this thread is to establish the problems you are having and hopefully seek a way to solve this problem from all the users here on cd.

I will post the other problems when i get more time, but i need to head over to the school for a FLL meeting.


Thanks,

Alex Cormier

[EHaskins]

This year I started/coached one FLL team(1193), and was a programming mentor for another(1192).
The plan had been to start one team at each of the local middle schools. The first school was very helpful they had teachers that help get student involved, but the second school we got no help from the administration

second team(1192) had four members and fell apart after two meetings.

The first team (1193) had over twenty members. We ended up having two teams at the same school.

To get members for the FLL teams we'll take the FRC robot and demonstrate that robot along with the LEGO and vex robot. I've found that its easier to get people interested in FRC robots then tell them they can do that in high school, but they can use the LEGO robots now.

[chris31]

In 7th grade I pushed for us to have a FLL team and got it and then as a 10th grader I pushed for an FRC team, we didnt get it but now in 11th I will get our own school team.

[Libby K]

Get ready for the ultra-long post, y'all.

Long before 1923 even exsisted, I had been begging my school to let us start an FRC team. I was in 8th grade, and the school was, at first, very cooperative. As my freshman year approached, things were looking up for 1923, and I couldn't wait to finally be on a team. It was what I'd been waiting for since I was very very young. However, since I was to be a freshman, and the administration needed upperclassmen to 'run' the team [noone would listen to a freshman...=P], Some seniors who expressed interest in it were appointed the leadership positions.

This would have been fine & dandy if they got FIRST. The seniors, as was predicted, didn't quite listen to some suggestions I made, and, as a result, goofed up what could have been some really good local sponsorships. However, sponsorship worked out just fine in the end [hooray for second chances and NASA grants!], and build season began.

Here came the biggest problem: the school I had had so much hope for in becoming a FIRST school...decided we were too much to handle. The long hours and lack of a reliable advisor pretty much got us booted out of our school. Once again, build season was looking pretty bleak.

Fortunately, my family's close connection with FIRST led us to team 25. I'd known them for a while & known about their RINOS program. They helped us make it through. I really can say they made sure 1923 happened. If we hadn't gotten their help, 1923 would have been competing with a kitbot.

WELL, enough with the story of my team. The moral of it is, keep pushing for your dream, and it'll happen. That's what I did, and 1923 happened. Thanks, FIRST!

p.s. if you want the even HAPPIER ending, we're working with the school to give us some shop space! & maybe a better advisor! yays!

p.p.s. oh, yeah, and i'm attempting to get our middle school's FLL team in gear/caring about FIRST. even longer story. don't get me started.

p.p.p.s. WOOT! 100th post!

[Nuttyman54]

For 971, it was getting notice within the school, getting mentors and getting sponsors were probably some of the hardest things that I've done. When Drew and I stepped up as team leaders, we had no official sponsors, no staff advisor and one parent mentor. In addition, most of the school didn't know we existed.

I had to quickly learn, along with the rest of the team, how to court sponsors, work with the school administration to set up activites and very quickly find a staff advisor.
I'm extremely proud of everything we accomplished that year, as well as how enthusiastically and successfully the current leadership has continued to improve the team.

As mentioned in another thread, I am now in the process of writing a team leadership handbook, detailing everything we learned that year about running a sucessful team. I'm extremely proud of everything we accomplished that year.

As one last note, I define success not as having a good robot. To be fair, our robot was very uncessful in competition. On the flipside, the team had the best spirit that I've ever seen, and more inspired students (and more students) than in previous years.

[Barry Bonzack]

Originally Posted by Alex Cormier

The purpose of this thread is to establish the problems you are having and hopefully seek a way to solve this problem from all the users here on cd.

I like the motivation behind this thread, but I believe this is what Chiefdelphi.com is for in general. I believe that any problem anyone is having some one else in FIRST has also had before. Therefore there must be a solution.

Before anyone posts any new question, I would like to reiterate the common "search before you post" response, this thread has the potential to get quite long. Answering questions with links to other threads that have answers could be most effective.

Also, don't forget NEMO is out there to help for those mentors occurring many non-engineering related issues.


As for recruiting new students, perhaps these link can help.
Recruiting
Recruiting new members
Recruiting - Getting people who are interested in robotics
I need help Recruiting
Team organization and Recruiting
Recruiting Freshman

Also, never doubt the power of a team promo-video. many of the kickoff videos are good examples, I also suggest team 67's 2005 animation. Feel free to use any of my videos found in my signature. Hope this all helps!

[RoboJedi75]

Getting a school adviser was one of the hardest things we've done as well. A lot of teachers have said they were interested, but the stipend the school gives for being an adviser wasn't worth the amount of the time involved. But our township doesn't have the resources to pay a third adviser, which would make the work load easier to handle. In the end, our school allowed one of the member's parents to take on the task because no adviser had stepped forward.

Another problem with my team in general is the lack of discipline. Bad behavior was, until recently, treated with empty threats and useless punishments. Maybe since the recent activity on our team, punishment will be more enforced this year. I guess we'll find out...

[Conor Ryan]

Ingredients to having a successful team:

• As many motivated students as you can get your hands on
  • Unmotivated students don't get the job done
• As many motivated mentors as you can get your hands on
  
  
  • Unmotivated mentors don't get the job done
• If your working out of a school, an active and enthusastic school liason, teacher, advisor, ect.
• A consistent place/time to meet
  
  
  • If you meet in different places some people will get confused and never show up
• A solid place to share information
  
  
  • Team Website
  • Team Forum
  • Google/Yahoo Group?
  • Google Calendar?
  • Google has a lot of productivity tools you can use, they do a good job in working them all together
• Information on who you have working with you
  
  
  • Forms are good for this
    • Online forms are best for this
      • Wufoo.com is your new best friend (the free accounts are sufficent for just about everything)
• Get parents involved
  • Parents provide: Food, Potential Sponsorships, Help where you need it, and possibly a mentor

Do all of this, and you will have a well organized team, organization is the foundation for any team, and bad organization leads to bad (defunct teams) Remember, the best team is one that makes it to competition.

[Athleticgirl389]

Originally Posted by RoboJedi75

Getting a school adviser was one of the hardest things we've done as well.

I agree. We had an advisor for the past 4 years, but he just had too much on his plate and couldn't come back. So now, we are really looking hard for one. This is deffinately the hardest thing for our team (this year). Without the advisor, our school won't let us do a lot. We were lucky to get their approval to go to Brunswick Eruption and Ramp Riot.

Also just getting the school behind us (more). Sometimes I feel they don't care, although I am told they do from someone who was on the team. I guess they do, I just wish they showed it more. I'm trying to think of way to get the school more into the team without pushing them away.

So the biggest problem is with the school backing us up like they do other teams, and getting an advisor. Hopefully the good off season we are having as a team right now leads to better things ome the 2007 season

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by RoboJedi75

Another problem with my team in general is the lack of discipline. Bad behavior was, until recently, treated with empty threats and useless punishments. Maybe since the recent activity on our team, punishment will be more enforced this year. I guess we'll find out...

Getting people to do something you want takes some practice, but usually "threatening" does not solve the problem, it just makes the people "too scared" to mis-behave. If you really want to get people to genuinely stop mis-behaving and have "discipline" on your team, I'd seriously suggest that you visit your local library or bookstore and pick up a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People. This book is a classic when it comes to being an effective leader and how to have successful people-skills.

If you want it summed up: don't threaten people, make them feel important and appreciated, earn their respect, and then they will wholeheartedly listen to you and do what you want. It sounds weird to some people, but it genuinely works.

[Alex Cormier]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Getting people to do something you want takes some practice, but usually "threatening" does not solve the problem, it just makes the people "too scared" to mis-behave. If you really want to get people to genuinely stop mis-behaving and have "discipline" on your team, I'd seriously suggest that you visit your local library or bookstore and pick up a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People. This book is a classic when it comes to being an effective leader and how to have successful people-skills.

If you want it summed up: don't threaten people, make them feel important and appreciated, earn their respect, and then they will wholeheartedly listen to you and do what you want. It sounds weird to some people, but it genuinely works.

very interesting book i must say Art. I just read the first few pages and i am very interested myself.

[Royalpride1070]

last year. we lost our teacher mentor.. so our team was in a bit of a delay... it was pretty easy finding another GREAT mentor. the main problem our team has is that we don't have enough people. last year we had 30 join the team, and 8 stay for the whole year. Obviously, working with 8 ppl was really hard. This year, we've tried really hard to get ppl to join, we showcased our robot, we had mini-robotics competitions, but we only had 13 stay this year. so our main problem is having enough people on the team. and. Unfortunately, about 6 of them joined the animation team, so only about 5 of us can build the robot...which is extremely hard.

[Jonathan Norris]

From my 3 years of experience on team 610 I feel that because of our somewhat unique structure our greatest challenge, and i feel as our greatest achievement, is the passing and growth of knowledge from year-to-year. We pride our selves on being a student run team, this being our distinct choice, but this brings great challenges with the turnover of leadership and knowledge every year. Every season brings a new team leader(s), and every year they approach the position differently with varying levels of success. Even though we are mainly student run we have three main teacher mentors and a retired electrical engineer who have been with us since the beginnings of FIRST in Canada. These mentors help bring stability in years where the leadership seems to struggle at times, and have gotten more involved in developing the Lego and VEX teams at our school recently.

Because the main leader changes every year and as with every team the graduating students move on. The majority of the technical knowledge usually resides in the minds of the the seniors, because of this we feel one of the most important tasks every year is for the older students to teach new students everything, from machining to electrical to programing to mechanical systems to design. And history has shown us that years where we put the focus on teaching the team is more successful. Because of this we have had many up and down years. The beginning of the team (2001-2003) was very successful, winning a chairman's award and a regional championship. However, once robotics started to get more popular at our school and after all this success the decision was made to make robotics more exclusive. Basically restricting the influx of new students every year. This lead to less success in the 2004 season and what could be described as a down year in 2005, not to say we weren't competitive just not at the level we strive to be. A sort of changing of the guard happened last year with new leadership, the focus was shifted to getting new students involved and on the sharing of all the technical knowledge. This resulted in the most grade 9 (freshmen) students joining our team and created a great new core of robotics students. The change in philosophy brought much more success to the team last year and a more competitive robot. This year we are retaining that philosophy and will continue to push the bar higher every year.

We have learned that every year is going to be different, with different student leaders leading the team. But the growth and advancement of the program is as important as single season success.

[Kyle Love]

Check out the Tkat Handbook from 01-02. I will try to see if we can't upload some of the more up-to-date handbooks.

More Handbooks are found here.

Some random tips:

• Get everyone involved
• Utilize each kids individual talents
• Make the meetings FUN!
• Don't let the team break into little cliques
• Create a "team leader" system with roles such as, team lead, mechanical lead, software lead, marketing lead and PR lead.

...more to come later...

[Ellery]

Ok Since Alex personally asked for me to post my thoughts on this I'll give it a whack.

As in any recruiting activity from my experiences in a high school organization, college fraternity, FIRST team , or work there's one thing in common - the "what's in it for me?" mentality.

1) ROI - If you want to successfully attract supporters and participants you have to sell them something that's the best thing since sliced bread, whether it be an experience or some "ROI - Return on Investment" (Business slang).

2) Target Audience - As in Alex's scenario I would advise to focus on an audience subset that would more likely be interested versus just having a grand display for gazillion folks. That's why Marketing has target audiences at specific age groups, or categories.

3) Timing - Some students already have tons of stuff they already signed up at the beginning of the school year so you should plan on targeting your audience either at the end of the season for the following year or over the summer before classes start. One example I've used in college for recruiting new fraternity members was soliciting freshman via mail and addressing their parents about the history and mission of the organization.

4) Buy-In - Besides student buy-in you also need school administration and parental buy-in. If the parents aren't willing to drive the potential member to /from the meetings then the member is a bust. Also if the school administration doesn't support it they won't allow any meetings or facilities to be accessible.


I can probably go on and on with some of the past experiences I've encountered but the above few are probably some of the big hitters.



This may be the last posting I make for the next 2 years since I'm heading back to grad school to pursue my Masters in Product Development at RIT and have handed over the RochesterFIRST/ FLRC/ XEROX FIRST Program/X-CATS reigns to my fellow teammates.

But all in all I'm always open for consultation...