Rookie team in need of a lot of help

[OregonRoboHawks]

I'm a sophmore on a team that's entirely new to this competition. We have about 14 people on our team and maybe two or three mentors at this point who know what they're doing.

So far we seem to be pretty far behind. We have had a lot of problems getting started.

Our team is made up of sophmores, freshman, and a few junior high school students. Of this group, only four or five are actually committed to this project. Still, even they do not always show up for our meetings. We are totally inexperienced in this field and have very little knowledge as to what we are supposed to do. This applies to almost every aspect of our robot. Another problem we have is that our mentors are usually unable to attend the nightly meetings. This means that we are not really able to gain the knowledge we need in order to complete our robot.

Design team
The design team is made up of three sophmores. I am the only one who can attend every night. None of us know how to use CAD at this point. All three of us are going to be working on programming as well. Right now, all three of us are on at least 2 other teams and are a little swamped. At this point we have only completed a rough draft of our final design that is not drawn to scale or dimensioned.

Electrical team
This team is pretty much non existent at this point. We have had an electrician come in last night and he got us a little more organized. Once again, as we are all lower classmen and come from a small school, we do not have any experience in electrical components.

Mechanical team
This team is slightly better off because we have shop and welding classes in our school. Still, many of the members making up this team are alittle....immature. Maybe more than alittle.

Programming team
The programming team is made up of myself and another member from the design team as well as a few more members. He at least has some experience in programming. Unfortunately, he is the only one who has an idea of what hes doing. One more problem with this is that we cannot access the EasyC Pro software included in the KOP because our license is missing or expired.

Animation
Pretty much nonexistant. We have no animation software besides AutoCad and the software included in the KOP.

Spirit team
This team is basically made up of three mom's who have been helping us out a lot.

At this point we are trying to assemble our chassis. It is not going well. We do not have a way to make the axles fit into the wheels. As we have no electrical experience we do not know how to assemble all the components on the chassis.

We are being mentored by the Winnovation team (1625) in Winnabago IL. So far they have done a great job but we do not want to burden them with our problems. It is our short comings that are making this difficult. We are very frustrated by our lack of progress. We would love to have some advice on anything you can think of.

Thanks
Oregon RoboHawks
Team 2364