The way I see it, team member involvement really stems from aquired interest. As you discussed, if the student does not have the interest, any contribution could likely be a “misinformed popular idea” which is when you get people in a team who don’t really contribute to anything.
If they don’t want to participate just because of a lack of knowledge that can be fixed, but if it’s a lack of interest in that whole part of the team don’t force it.
That is where my idea slightly diverges. The way I see it, lack of knowledge and lack of interest are mutually inlcusive. A truly interested member would for sure develop knowledge over time, of course at different rates, but at least to the extent where they can meaningfully contribute. Kinda like in a classroom setting, someone who interest in the subject would ask the teacher for more info after class, and with the extended knowledge the student would be more confident in speaking up in class. You can toss 15 freshmen into a lecture room, but not everyone retains the information equally. At school, you have the motivation to retain information for the sake of your grade, but at robotics sometimes people would rather watch reels. Parents can often treat robotics like a daycare, signing up their kid for something they may not be necessarily interested in. In essence, not every student has the same level of interest or motivation to do things, but interest enables one to learn more, and hence do more for their team.
On my team, our goal is typically to prioritize performance, so naturally students who are more engaged and knowledgeable get more opportunities to do stuff. In fact, students who are more engaged but less knowledgeable can often do more for the team that students who are knowledgeable, but disengaged. As I previously mentioned, being engaged drives the motivation to learn more.
don’t force it.
This is 100% true. If a student doesnt really want to do anything they of course would only put a haphazard effort into it. The real question is how to brew interest and engagement. The best way I think is to do offseason things that are low risk for doing bad, but high reward in regards to developing interest. In doing so, students who may not normally be allowed to participate as much during FRC are given the opportunity to do more, allowing them to develop that interest and motivation.
My team sometimes has an implicit distrust for freshmen, understandably so since they haven’t had as much experience. But if they never get to do anything due to that, how do they gain that experience? Offseason things.
We particiapte in the OCCRA offseason competition, and through this many students who had not done as much in the past FRC season really took a step up and became much more excited to get the job done. Furthermore, all the freshman had the opportunity to share parts of the prototyping, designing, and building process giving them that real-world experience of how a robotics competition is meant to run.
However, there is a key difference between how teams can approach offseason things. Is it a “screw it, throw the newbies to the deep end, I don’t really care about the outcome since its not FRC” or “let’s run this like FRC, where only the upperclassmen do anything”? It really needs to be a balance. In the past, we had took the former approach to OCCRA, basically leaving the blind following the blind. On the flip side, if upperclassmen only do the work, the blind do not get the opportunity to become un-blind. But this year we really reevaluated our approach. Our goal is to win. When we win, previously uninterested students have the opportunity to be more interested. After all, winning does feel good. In order to win, the former approach definitely does not work. On top of that, the former approach allows new students to teach themselves, leaving them with a different understanding of how design and build in FRC, causing lack of participation due to lack of knowledge.
How do we fix this? This year, upperclassmen were instructed by our mentors to “become” the mentors, and run the OCCRA season like how we would in FRC. Through this, the upperclassmen mentors had the final say in the design of the robot, where we would use prior experience to make a more informed decision as opposed to allowing democracy of those without that prior experience to guide them. However, the designing part was not all done by the upperclassmen. Rather, we guided the underclassmen in the direction of how to come up with a strategic design. Through the CADing and fabbing process, we wanted upperclassmen to work alongside the freshman, rather than doing it all themselves or only being teachers.
Overall, it really comes down to that fine balance of letting underclassmen do things to the extent where they develop the interest, but upperclassmen have to avoid letting them develop the wrong understanding of how to create a robot, in order to prevent them from being shafted into an unimportant role due to lack of knowledge. Again, lack of interest and lack of correct knowledge are the same things. By taking this approach to OCCRA, we were able to make a competetive robot archetype wise, but simultaneously allowing underclassmen to get hands-on. (Same thing applies to driving the robot, not just designing/building; our drive team for OCCRA was rotating at the first comp, and everyone but drive coach were underclassmen)
In doing so, we succeeded in making the students more engaged and interested, objectively making the team more competetive overall since there is a large class of students with a greater potential to learn the technical nitty gritty. At the end of the day, it is impossible to make everyone equally interested but there are definitely things you can do to bolster the overall interest. Remember, greater interest = greater potential to learn = greater overall knowledge = greater overall involvement = greater team performance, that is consistent over time and not just short lived.
Mightve written too much, but just wanted to get this off of my chest since our team has had a recurring issue of where there is just too much of a deviation between those who are interested and those who are not. This deviation results in classes graduating who are crazy dedicated, and other classes who still think robotics is daycare as a senior. This tracks with our highly inconsistent performance year-to-year. Being a consistently good team is a goal of mine, and I think it really stems from developing that interest and motivation early on.
I would say the distribution follows the same trend that our team normally sees in members year to year, as I’m sure many others do as well. Please don’t crucify me for accuracy of the chart below, its just a very generalized concept to hopefully get the idea across.
