FAHA: To motivate or to dissolve?

[Bharat Nain]

Rarely, a team experiences extreme difficulties in the area of motivating their students to participate in building a robot. Eventually, they are faced with a decision as to whether they should dissolve their team or find new ways to motivate their students. What advice could you offer this FIRST-A-HOLIC?

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I am the team lead as well as the corporate sponsor (my company) contact for a local team. I've been doing quite a bit of soul searching in the past two years while watching the quality and intensity disappear from the students.

This year we will lose the last of the kids that have shown any significant interest in doing any work. Most students who bother to show up sit around and do nothing. They will not go onto Chief Delphi to research. They will not experiment. They will not think for themselves. When you push them for solutions they become disruptive.

One could build a complete robot by 'mooching' off of teasers on this site by week 1- I have made it a requirement that everyone has CD accounts- so far, 3 do.

My company puts a significant amount of educational budget into this program. As a 'good corporate citizen' I believe what we're doing is good and just- but now I don't know what to do.

I have two options:
1) At the conclusion of this year I am going to inform the team that I will not be putting in paperwork to renew the donation for the coming year and that they will have to come up with the money themselves.

2) I slash the budget of the team to just the 'event' money and anything else they have to pay for themselves/solicit donations.

I'm really out of knobs to turn. I feel those that are interested are better off sent to other schools' teams because, frankly, we're doing a disservice to those students interested in engineering.

So how do you shut down a team?

(As of 1/23/09 we don't have a chassis, we don't have a working cRio, we don't have a working ball mechanism, we have no functioning camera, we have NO programming at all completed, the programming team hasn't bothered to read the documentation yet, and maybe only 2 kids have read the rules completely)

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FIRST-a-holic Anonymous mailbox is a place to share your concern and frustration about your FIRST experience anonymously. It is the perfect place if you just want someone to listen, or ask for advice when you don’t know what to do. Submit your letters today at the FIRST-a-holic anonymous mailbox forum. If you wish to respond to this thread anonymously, please PM Bharat Nain or Beth Sweet with your response and thread title.