Being a Good team leader!

[Bomberofdoom]

Originally Posted by GMKlenklen

Hi, all

We, the MASMabot high council, have enacted a small lego robot turnament to sort of get the ball rolling and the minds turning and generally enlighten the team . The task was almost overwhelming (like first games) but defianately possible, if you spent enough time and or came up with some good ideas. We split up into 4 groups, each with one RCX kit.

Now the problem:
The teams never really took the initiative to come togeather, brainstorm and build a robot like we where hopeing they would (we did have team leaders to make this planed, not just sporatic). Instead the lego pieces remained unanimated, and come competition time, there where only two teams that actually had a non-default program on their robot!

Ok, so that may have ben a slight failure on our parts interms of not takeing the initiative for them... but is this really the way it should be done? These kids signed up for robotics, and i have seen them build, and think... but how do we get the team from step one to the final stages?

Thanks!

We almost had the same thing in our first year in the FRC. We started with 26 people and came down to only 8-10 who actually DID the robot by themselves. I was very mad at our team leaders for not talking with everyone about our working terms. They didn't work too much either, but they did most of their jobs. I was the head of the programming team at that time, busy in understanding how to FRC code works. I shouldn't have been mad at them because this was our first year, our team signed up pretty late and our mentor didn't have enough time to explain to us about FIRST, so everyone didn't have nay expirience in anything, including our first team leaders. It kind of points a finger towards our school that they registered us pretty late, but we all didn't know about anything so we were just out of luck all of this year. Towards the 5th and 6th week of the building, I started seeing how drastic we were and I decided that I should try to lead the team in what time is left.
I did what I could, but it wasn't THE best, but I'm sure it was something.
What came out is that in the Regional competition we came out 33rd out of 33 teams in the ranking(but that was from sheer bad luck because our other alliance teams just didn't play well with us, but mystiriously did well with others), but we ended up being chosen by the 6th ranked team to join their alliance in the eliminations and we were able to reach the Semi-Finals. We also won the Xerox Creativity Award, but even though we made a very special magazine for FIRST in order to try to get the Rookie All Star award, but we didn't get it because we weren't able to spread out the word about it enough around the competition. It shows how much we've put into this project and it wasn't good at all, but we did come out with something and not just empty handed.
Currently I'm taking things into hand and making sure that only those who really favor this project are to be here, not because they get their school project that have to do, but because they want to have fun in building a robot. FIRST is really an amazing expirence that only those who are ready to dedicate should join, but everyone should have a try at it.
This year may have been a troublesome one, but we'll back to show what we got.

Leadership is important.

This is my opinion of what is leadership, teamwork and a team in FIRST terms.

Dedication + Enthusiasm + Expirience = Leadership
[Leadership + Friends] * Active = Teamwork.
Teamwork + Goal = Team