Keeping the Pits Streamlined

[JewishDan18]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

One thing some teams do (I don't know how many, but every team I've been on / near in FRC / FTC has done it) is that if there are judges in the pits, keep walking unless it's vitally important (like, say, bringing the robot to a match). If you weren't involved with the construction of a particular component and a judge would ask you about it, it would put you in a weird situation. I mean, we don't tell people "never talk to judges" or something, but if the pits full of judges, then the pit's full, you know? A crowd swarming the judges isn't really a good idea; we love judges but we're not here to crowd surf them

Judges normally don't come around in lunch unless they got interrupted by a match or you're doing something very right. If people want to stop by the pits, lunch would be the time to do it.

You can still have everyone get the chance to be in the pit, but is there really that much to do other than "fix the robot" and "talk to teams" (which is better done walking between pits)? It's not a terribly exciting place to be most of the time.

Do you have everyone on your team assigned to a role at competition? Our team helps get around the problem with stand scouting; we basically don't have enough people between stand scouting, pit recon, and the other competiton jobs to _have_ anyone who's free to stand around for more than a half hour or so, and those people on break usually want to check out other robots.

My concerns with judges are the same. The reason people want to be in the pit is that most of the "cool" kids on the team are either pit crew or drivers, they draw people to the pit. We have something like 60 kids at competitions, so its hard to find roles for all them. Many of them aren't reliable enough to effectively scout, unfortunately. That's something else we're working on...

Originally Posted by NorviewsVeteran

I noticed about six or seven of my teammates hanging around 'supervising' in the aisle at competition, so I took a moment to ask each one, "what are you doing?" and if they answered 'nothing' or mumbled some BS answer, I sent them to the stands.

I try this also, but since the head mentors had the "anyone can see the robot" policy, I never got very far.

[kristenliz_28]

Nice thread Dan

If I may add something, Dan, myself and another pit captain were thinking about having 'pit credits' where a student that participates during the build season is given a credit by the mentor he/she was working with. This credit is worth, say, 15 minutes in the pit. This way the students that did the most during the build season would be able to reap the benefits of their hard work

However, this system seems a bit complicated to me. We have quite a large team, so managing who has what # of credits could become confusing, and if we gave the credits out as pieces of paper kids could lose them ...

Anyone have any ideas on how this system could be improved?

[MoniqueSays]

I think our system of pit credits is a good idea, the only problem is that our team isn't good at keeping record of things. However, instead of handing out the credits as pieces of paper, maybe coins would be a better idea (emulate the safety credits at each competition, maybe?). Maybe have each student write their initials on a piece of masking tape and put it on the coin itself. When they visit the pit, they can just hand in their coin in a bag.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

A simple posted schedule of crew time assignments works well. Students are assigned pit, strategy, data collecting, free time or Chairman's booth.

[gorrilla]

My team dosent' usually have this problem(as we dont have many people)

But we give everyone different assignments(scouting,talking to judges/other teams,etc..)

Usually everyone who's not on the drive team is in the stands or walking around the pits looking at other teams/robots/cool stuff......

I think this is because our robots' seem to be unbreakable for some reason(I think this has something to do with us being overweight all the time too) so we dont usually need more than 4 students is the pits anyways(drive team and safety captain)

If its a space problem try reorganizing your pit(worked well for us)