How many people are on your team?

[Ken Delaney]

The one thing that amazed me down at nationals was how large some of these teams are. I think half the reason the awards ceremony was over 2 hours is that it took 10 minutes for one team to get its award. Our team is relatively small 19 students and and 7 adults. Also some teams looked like that had more mentors than students.

[Koko Ed]

We got 38 kids and 31 adults. Not all of them could make it down to Florida(Some of the kids had AP's coming up and some of the adults passed on comming down). In previous years the X-Cats had upwards of 50+ kids I was told(this was my 1st year) but that was inefficient because too many kids were idle doing nothing. 40 kids is an ideal maximum for us I'm told. I think the mentor number at 30 to 35 is preferred.

[nick-190]

We had 83 people at nationals this year. The entire junior class (50 Students) goes down along with some seniors (about 10) teachers, and WPI students. I didn't really realise how big the team was until we won a judges award. I was one the first people in line and as I went back to our seats which were in the back member from our team were still going down. Our team is over 150 high school students and college students with 1 adult mentor.

[Alfred Thompson]

Should the count include people who just show up to eat pizza and drink soda?
I don't know what the ideal number is. It really depends on who does what. You can probably build a robot with 3-4 people. You need 3 kids to run the robot. Those could be the same as the people who build it so you could in theory have a team with 3 kids and some number of mentors.

[Noah]

This was our first year and our team was about 12 kids and 2 adult mentors. At almost every meeting someone wasn't there, and we still often had someone sitting around waiting for something to do. I personally don't know what would happen if we had 40 people on our team... probably we'd have 10 people dedicated to managing the team and keeping everyone going... and that just seems silly!

Our team took about 19 students or so to nationals, but we do have a few more....

Our team looked big because the engineers/teachers/parents/and student sibblings outnumbered our team

[Harrison]

My team wasn't at the Nat's...but we have in total around 25 students involved, and probably 4 or 5 adults.

We hope to get more for next year, esp on the adult side.

[Suike]

My team, Heatwave, used to have like 75 people on it. We had a lot of people that never showed up to work on the bot or knew how the game worked or anything and were just there to have fun and provide "spirit." This year we knocked the team down to 50 and you had to work to earn your spot on the team. Only about a core group of about 8 people are actually bot builders (Pit Crew) and this includes the drivers, then we have 2 main engineers and one mentor also in the Pit Crew working on the bot. Then about 10 people are really into the strategy part. We have one main person who works with one of the engineers and stays in the pits and goes around to all the teams and works out strategies. Then there are about 7 captains (me being one of them ) which control teams of 4 which do "strategy sheets" or scouting during the specific matches. The rest of the team is basically spirit. I liked having a smaller team this year as compared to the much larger amounts of the previous years. Really only need about 40 people per team.

[asher]

YIPPIE FOR SMALL TEAMS!!!

we have 8 highschoolers and around 10 college/grad students (we strive for 10 and 10, but a 2 highschoolers quit during the season) we love our small team and our partnership with the university of tulsa, we had a huge team before but we all really love it being this small, were just all a family

ashley

[Daniel Schulze]

the last years everybody could join our team, but now we limited it to 36 students. at the nationals we had around 26 students and 5 mentors/adults. i'm really satisfied with this team size and i don't want a bigger team, because then you get a lot of people in that don't do anything. also a samll team compared with these 100-member teams we won a spirit award, sportsmanship award and some spirit awards we got from other teams, without using any noisemakers, except our voices.

daniel

[Jeff Rodriguez]

officialy there are 35 students on our team. Only about 15 do something though.

[Jessi]

our team has something around 25 students and 10 adults that work the shole six weeks and about 20 of the students ended up traveling to the regional and nationals. But we had trouble keeping 25 people busy so i dont know what the big teams of like 40 kids do.

jessi

[Ben Mitchell]

How in the world can a team have 90 or more kids???

even more than 20????

What do all these kids do, or do they just go to florida and cheer? They can't all work on the robot.

Why not just start another team (or 2, or 4, or 6 )? It seems silly to have a million kids on a robotics team.

Even with 30 kids, the team feels kinda crowded...

[Melissa Nute]

We have 35 this year and we realized that is too much....it should only be about 20-25 next year i think....*counts the seniors that are leaving and other random people....*yep...

[Jeff Waegelin]

We started with 25 students in September, but by the time we got to regionals, we were down to 13 students. We also have a few alumni that show up occasionally, 2 teachers (1 really active, 1 not), and several parents.