Limits on Team Hours

[Dale]

As the Head Coach & Mentor of the team (1540) facing these restrictions, a little background might be in order.

Our team is based at a small top-tier private school, Catlin Gabel in Portland, OR, with 280 students in the entire high school. We had 25 students on our team this season. Therefore, when robotics is in full swing the impact on students and thus the minds of the faculty is big. Students are required to log at least 50 hours in the fall and 50 during build season to be on the team. The average for build season was 120hrs, median 108hrs. One student logged 350+ hrs, another around 300. All the rest were below 200.

Our robot is entirely student designed and built. I say this as a way of underlining the fact that the students know that if they don't get something done, the mentors aren't going to fill in the gaps. That can lead to some excessive hours for those deeply invested.

Our school doesn't have grades in the normal sense. There are written comments on each student's performance at various intervals throughout the year. They then synthesize a letter grade for colleges at the end of the year.

This school is incredibly intense, with 100% going on to college, often to Ivy league schools. The normal homework load on a given night is 4-6 hours. Every class is basically AP, though we don't call it that. The students sometimes negotiate extensions for big assignments that happen during build season.

Our team has just finished up our sixth year. This year there were complaints from the faculty that robotics was having too big an impact on the academic performance of several of our students. That triggered a review of the program and hence the caps being discussed.

The caps would be:
200 hours max per student IN THE LAB. What they do outside of the lab is their business.

3:00-6:30pm on school nights in the lab. Open until 10:00pm on non-school nights.

Saturdays 10:00am-10:00pm

Holidays 10:00am-6:30pm

Sundays 10:00am-6:30pm near ship, otherwise closed.


While I wasn't a fan of artifical caps when they were first brought up, I've come to see them as just another constraint that must be balanced, just like performance, weight, time, expense, etc. What I do like about it is it forces the team to develop a broader set of base skills so that more of the team gets involved in the time consuming parts of the robot's design and construction.

Thanks for all your thoughtful comments so far! Keep them coming.