increased team size

[svenw]

We have been a fairly smallish team the last few years, usually around 15 or so. We have had problems with simply to much work for not enough people, so this year we have decided to do a lot more recruitment and get more of the school involved.We currently have around 30 new students who are interested which is great and all, but i just have a few questions for the larger teams. Now I know having more new students than old students is going to be a lot of work, but we are prepared for this, and are also getting more mentors to help out.

First of all where do you hold your team meetings?
our classrooms only really have room for 30 students, and that is just not enough room for the entire team to have an all inclusive meeting. So where do teams hold meetings? Do you split up into several groups, admin and build, and simply send out emails to keep everyone informed?

Secondly, how do you keep new students interested? We are going to be doing training sessions before kickoff this year, so students learn how to use the tools, and know how FIRSt works, but should we maybe get a few vex kit to keep them excited, and get them thinking the way of first?

Is there anything else we should be prepared for, any useful information we should know about?