Largest team?

[Jon Stratis]

"Also what do you guys thing the highest number of students a team should have and why?"

A team's size should be dependent on two things: student interest and student engagement.

First, student interest: Only students who are interested and want to gain something from the program should be there. There's no sense in "forcing" people to join just to have a bigger team, if those people aren't interested enough to be active participants.

Second, student engagement: You want to make sure all members of the team are engaged and have something to do. If you can only fit 20 people in your workspace, it doesn't make sense to have 50 people show up and 30 of them sit in the hall. I'm a firm believer, however, that there is enough to do with FIRST and on a team that the team would have to be ridiculously huge before you run out of things to do. Community engagement, fund raising, PR, etc are aspects that are often neglected by smaller teams, so their time can be spent building a robot to work.

There is one very important thing to remember in all of this: The larger the team, the more planning needs to be done to ensure everyone is engaged and active. Very large teams may not all meet at the same time or location every time - they may have groups that meet on different nights to complete specific tasks, or those involved with building the robot may be in a different physical location than those working on PR and fund raising.