Member Turnover Issues

[David Brinza]

I know a team that has 100% student turnover each year: Team 1717. Their FRC team is composed of seniors only!

Each year, the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy accepts 32 students who enter as freshmen and, after three years of rigorous courses, become students of the FIRST Robotics Class (ROP). D'Penguineers deliver incredible robots and have some of the most knowledgeable and capable students you will find in FRC. Visit them at Championship: this year they won the Los Angeles Regional and Engineering Inspiration Award.

Perhaps this isn't the right model for most FRC teams, but it shows what is possible with well-prepared students.

I'd like to hear more from some 1717 students and alumni about their FRC experience!

[rsilverstein]

Originally Posted by David Brinza

I know a team that has 100% student turnover each year: Team 1717. Their FRC team is composed of seniors only!

Each year, the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy accepts 32 students who enter as freshmen and, after three years of rigorous courses, become students of the FIRST Robotics Class (ROP). D'Penguineers deliver incredible robots and have some of the most knowledgeable and capable students you will find in FRC. Visit them at Championship: this year they won the Los Angeles Regional and Engineering Inspiration Award.

Perhaps this isn't the right model for most FRC teams, but it shows what is possible with well-prepared students.

I'd like to hear more from some 1717 students and alumni about their FRC experience!

David is exactly right; The DP Engineering Academy is actually a part of Dos Pueblos High School (opposed to an entirely independent academy. Members are regular students at the high school who, every year, take a course or two on engineering, physics and computer science and then senior year the whole program culminates in the participation of FIRST.

We clearly have issues with senior turnover, the goal of the program is to give as many people as possible a chance at robotics. Is it hard this way? Yes. But because of this, in four years we have 128 people going through the program who have all had their own build seasons and gone to their own competitions.

We definitely try to prepare the younger classes for robotics though. The program would be lost without the amazing instruction of our director (Amir Abo-Shaeer) and the mentors. We also encourage the freshmen through junior classes to go and watch at the competitions and they are consistently being updated on how the build-season is going.

Because we have an entire new class every year we run the risk of having a really good robot one year, and then the next year lack computer programming or electrical skills, for example, and not doing as well.... but so far the program has worked out great.

[Andy S]

I personally love the setup 1717 has for FRC. As a freshman, sophomore, and junior, we take engineering or physics classes, but also watch as the seniors get to build a robot. This is inspiration in itself, as every student from every grade level finds themselves trying harder in classes in preparation for senior year. Then, when senioritis kicks in for most of the school, we find ourselves working for hours and hours on a project that we love.

The passion and intensity is upped due to the fact that each class has their one year to try and qualify for Atlanta. When 1717 looks back at its past years, we think of the class that made each robot and what they accomplished, not in terms of winning, but in terms of building the best robot they were capable of building. Each year has a sense of pride for their robot that they built.

However, I feel the best thing about the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy is the school wide excitement. The Academy is a 128 student academy at a public high school of 2400 kids. What amazes me is the culture FIRST has provided. We have school wide recognition and have fan buses and cheerleaders come to Regionals to watch robots play soccer.

The 32 student turnover each year may not be ideal for many teams. One of our teacher's goals is to serve as many students as possible, and this is the way he chose to accomplish this.

If anyone has any questions regarding the Academy or Team 1717, feel free to ask.

[Zach Purser]

Originally Posted by David Brinza

Each year, the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy accepts 32 students who enter as freshmen and, after three years of rigorous courses, become students of the FIRST Robotics Class (ROP).

Wow, this really shows the difference in teams. We have ~28 students total, freshman through seniors, and I think only ~18 of those work on the robot. The others work on animation, fundraising, outreach, etc... And our team is a club activity, no school class time is allocated to the students to work on FIRST.

In regards to turnover, losing your veterans is always an issue. I make a point that anything a senior is working on, an underclassman should be working with them. The same is true of the drive team, it's good to have a mix of seniors and underclassmen so someone can explain next year what it's like being on the floor during a match. You have to pass on your knowledge, and while documentation is good, it's hard to beat hands-on experience.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by thefro526

Last year we took 16 Students to Atlanta. 15 of them were Seniors, One of the was a Sophomore who's now our Captain and Driver.

This happened to us 2 years ago. We had almost 20 active students for Overdrive. For Lunacy, we had 7 (mostly due to graduation). We lost a good number of mentors around the same time. All but 3 of us were seniors, though I've come back as a mentor. We have a very young team this year, but thankfully (miraculously) we're back up to around 20 students. There's been significant loss of build and oversight experience, both in administration and fabrication, though. Fortunately, we picked up quite a few new mentors as well, a couple of whom are old hats in FIRST.

Our new model has 3 components:
1) Mentoring - focusing on students mentoring students, specifically seniors to underclassmen, but in reality anyone who can serve in that capacity for a given skill/task. Historically, we've haven't really guided the upperclassmen to this, though some of us tended towards it anyway. [This student-to-mentor transition sure makes first-person grammar really hard.]
2) Recruiting - lots of it! Get in the schools (we hope specifically the CAD, tech ed, etc classes) talk to the teachers, get in the community, demo to sponsors (perspective mentors and their kids), just talk a lot.
3) Retention - this hasn't really a big problem for us (other than the whole graduation thing), but it's always good to keep in mind. Robotics isn't for everyone, but if someone's drifting away it can be good to (nicely) ask why, just in case there's anything you can do. This question is usually better coming from a student (reduces chance of sounding accusatory). This can apply to mentors heading in a different direction as well. Even if they do come around less, it's good to keep in touch with them.

[Dragon Princess]

On our team Next year will be a massive turn over as over half the class will graduate, before it was only about five kids a year.

To prevent this from affecting us we take in huge amounts of rookies each year and 'crash course' train them in a specific field, that way our numbers stay high and even with normal age groups fluctuations we'll always have people still on them team.

We have invaluably found out that recruiting is very important.