Having some issue with our school’s admin with regards to build schedule. Comes down to them not wanting us in the building on Sundays, as well as wanting us to scale back our hours.
During season we run:
Friday: 4-9
Saturday: 8-9
Sunday: 8-9
Monday: 4-8
We don’t tend work much during the week, as our mentors are not able to get to the school.
Anyways, was wondering how the rest of you organized your build season, trying to see if there are any better was of organizing/showing the administration how much time other teams put in.
Our team runs the first 2 weeks like so:
Mon-Thur 3:30-6 unofficial, 6-8:30/9:00 officially
Sat 9-4:30
The last four weeks get a tad bit more intense:
Mon-Fri 3:30-6 unofficial, 6-9:00 official
Sat 9-5
By unofficial I mean that when homework is done, students get right into work, official is the official meeting when everyone is there. The more dedicated students go 3:30/4-8:30/9.
Officially, this works out to about 20.5 meeting hours per week, plus 12.5 hours for some students working when they can.
Jays schedule pretty sums up 1058 and during my time on 1519 we held similar hours.
3467 had more 3-6/3-8 week days with 9 to 5 on Saturdays. We kept Sundays off until the last weekends of build. After two years we took off Wednesdays to give everyone a break. 2015 with more mentors working all day we moved to evenings 6-9 keeping Wednesdays off and kept our weekend hours the same.
No two teams are alike but just looking in from the outside those are a lot of hours compared to most teams who stick to 3-4 hour weekdays and one maybe two 8 hour days on the weekend. If you aren’t utilizing all of those hours effectively consider taking a day off or trimming down some hours (for the first few weeks of build season).
Our build season schedule is 5:00-7:30 Mon, Tue, Thu, and 9am-3pm Saturday. School ends at 4:00, but so few mentors are able to get there before 5:00 that we have an hour in between. This is enough time for students to get a quick dinner (Papa John’s is across the street, and several other food places are within 1/2 mile of the school.) The head coach or another teacher friendly to the team usually has a classroom for team members to get in an hour of homework. As the season progresses, some sessions will run later, often just for one project or department. Saturdays usually wind up running a good bit longer later in build season. We rarely add Tuesdays, Fridays, or Sundays, and when we do, it is for a specific purpose, not a full team build.
Edit: During the 2014 build season, we experimented with more build time availability, but with the expectation that not all students or mentors would attend essentially every session. Communications and coordination between the various build groups broke down, and in about a week, we were back on our base schedule. Maybe with slack helping keep us in touch we might try something like this again. We have a prospective member with Saturday commitments, but who can work Sundays, and several of our mentors may be willing to do Sunday. We only have two regular mentors and three students who were around in 2014, and I am the only one who was a veteran that year, so we may give it a shot.
Edit2:
We have the same base schedule between build and competition, but we’re less likely to extend it and more likely to cancel for holidays and such than before bagging. A lot more of this is drive practice (the past three years we built two robots; in 2014 Woody was a wooden prototype for Buzz, and in 2015 and 2016 Peabody and R00 were essentially twins of Atlas and T1GGR).
3:30 to around 8 PM, possibly later, on weekdays; weekends are 10 AM to 8 PM or thereabouts. During the last few weeks of build, the end time stretches.
Now, that being said, we do shut down completely for a week due to finals, and we do take a dinner break around 5 PM (and a lunch break around noon on weekends). Not all students need to be there the entire time, either.
We had two students with over 300 hours, and four with over 250 during the 2015 build season. We didn’t meet on Sundays during the competition season but the rest of the hours are the same
Monday through Friday: 4:00pm-9:30pm
Saturdays and holidays: 10:00am-4:00pm
I don’t think this schedule is great because it caused a lot of students to get burned out. In addition to the hours listed here, our school takes a two week break every six weeks for electives, and we had a robotics work time for half of our school day in addition to after school workshops.
We’re 4:00-7:00 every weekday (in theory). In practice, during the last couple build season weeks, we start to push to 7:30… then 8:00… 8:45… etc.
(Note: Because of build space constraints, on any given day we can only have 10-12 students building, so we generally retain the most core members and rotate out others. Newer kids might find themselves coming in twice a week, etc).
6-9 M-Th then 10:00-5:30 with an hour for lunch at 1 on the weekends, depending on your position on the team you are expected to be at most of the meetings, some people got to every meeting, some people can only make the weekends due to homework and sports. You have to be at certain amount to be considered for drive or pit crew.
We do 6pm-9pm on monday-thursday, 3pm-9pm on friday and 9am-3pm on saturday. No days are required, but we require a certain number of hours to be able to be signed out of school for competitions.
Full team meetings are from 2-8 on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday (with Friday being optional) and 9-2 on Saturday. We have separate driver practice sometimes on Monday and Wednesday.
The school kicks us out at 2 on Saturday and isn’t open on Sunday, which sucks because longer uninterrupted weekend meetings could be really productive.
Mon: 3-10PM: Department Sessions*
Tue: 3-4:30PM: Leadership Meetings; 3-10PM Department Sessions
Wed: 7AM-8AM Large Group Meeting** (LGM); 3-4PM LGM
Thu: 3-10PM Department Sessions
Fri: 3-10PM Department Sessions
Saturday: Department Sessions (9-9:15AM LGM); 8AM-11PM
*Department Sessions are meant for each department to schedule meeting times to accomplish specific goals.
**Large Group Meeting (LGM) is for all students in FRC 4607. This meeting is designed to broadcast all pertinent information across all channels. This allows all members to see what is happening in all departments of 4607. Essentially, this is our clearinghouse meeting each week.
New this year is a Hub Meeting for student leaders and mentors. The day has yet to be determined.