Too many students in the build site

[ahartnet]

When I was a mentor for 1646 at Purdue back in...2007 (I think?) we tried to do rotation, but with mentors - not students. We were doing this because all the team mentors were college students though (no professional engineers, and just 1 un-involved teacher that was the non-college/high school student), and it was tough to take that much time away from a college course load

What we basically did was something a schedule like this A+B team (get everyone on the same page); A team (X meetings in a row); A+B team (one night, update B team on A team problems/solutions/progress), B team (X meetings in a row), then repeat.

This doesn't meet your needs exactly. It might be feasible to have your different subteams on different schedules so that the A+B team nights isn't the whole team, but only say the whole manipulator subsystem or whatever.

It's simultaneously great and not-helpful that all your non-building subsystem teams are also involved in the robot building process. It'd be great if they could just meet somewhere with some computers or wifi access and get some of the work done remotely. That might help some nights, but it doesn't sound like it would be a solution.

Best of luck to y'all this year. It's a problem that needs a solution, but like you mentioned it's a good kind of problem to have!

[WSlbl]

Our team is at a boarding school, so it may be hard for other schools.
For our build and electronics teams during build season, we have two schedules. Our team breaks in half (mostly due to the day/boarder differences, but not always) and one team meets right after school while the other meets after dinner (7-ish). Usually the teams will prototype different types of robots (with the same base and driving system) and then decide on one. Once they decide on one, the two teams tackle different parts of the robot and practice schedules change depending on who wants to work on what. Every Monday we have an all-team meeting (including all other subteams) to go over progress and goals for the week where people can ask questions and have input. Everyone has one day off during the week and weekend practice can be attended by anyone who wants to come. During the weekends and Monday afternoons are when all builders meet and work together.
Programming and Business usually meet in a different place or at a different time.