Better than I could have done xD
Thanks!
6065 goes everyday during the week 3-6pm, and Saturdays 10-4
As of the previous post, some compiled stats from the heat map:
Average Build Season weekly hours - 26.3
Most likely times to find an FRC team in thier shop: Saturday 10am-3pm
followed by Thursday 6-8pm, then Tuesday 6-8pm.
I’m kind of glad someone said something about this sort of issue, because our team has a similar struggle. We represent a Catholic School and Parish, and we meet in the Parish Center, so we’re basically allowed to stay there until the building closes, and that’s about it. Because of this, our typical meeting schedule during build season looks a little something like this:
Mondays-Wednesdays: 5:30-7:30pm (We have to wait for our mentors to get off work and then, again, we stay until the building closes)
Thursdays (for Programmers only, Knights of Columbus also meets that night, so we have to keep the noise down): 5:30-7:30pm
Saturdays: 10am-2pm (Sometimes later if we decide to move the whole shop to our lead mentor’s garage and work 
)
I’m not sure how helpful this is, but I’m sure if your school is super strict on when they want you in the building, then there may be other teams in the area that are willing to let you use their space (or even a practice field if they have one!). There were a few teams that did this for us last season (Thanks 2137, 3539, 2612, 3098, and Bob Nichols of Kettering University!) and it really made a huge difference in how much we were able to get done (and how successful we were in competition).
I’ve always liked skipping Mondays and Fridays (unless Monday is a holiday) and doing the rest. Seems to help with burnout as the breaks are evenly space time wise.
Glad to hear most teams take Sunday’s off for rest. the only sunday we did last year was on Kickoff weekend and it was only in afternoon for a few hours.
I grabbed just the first two columns of “Raw Data” and did a histogram. MrCool/MechEng83, can you add my second worksheet into your google doc?
Histogram-hours.xlsx (14.9 KB)
Histogram-hours.xlsx (14.9 KB)
Last year Texas adopted FIRST Robotics as an official UIL (which lays out some of the rules for high school competition in Texas) activity. The rules say a club or team cannot “require” more than 8 hours from Monday morning to Friday close of school. So we plan to cut hours to Monday 6-8, Tuesday 6-9, Thursday 6-9, Friday 6-10 and two shifts Saturday 10-4 and 4-10. UIL discourages activities on Sundays. Hopefully this does not impact our work flow too much! We are trying to be more strategic and scripted to be more productive during our limited (compared to previous seasons) meeting schedule. Crossing our fingers …
Out of curiosity, how tightly related are the two changes of FIRST being an official UIL activity and the impending startup of Texas Districts (scheduled for 2017, but pushed off to 2018)?
Added:
Clint, I believe that many of the teams, particularly those with 30+ hours per week, are reporting “shop open” times, not mandatory times. Just looking at the first page of this thread, you can see this in posts 10, 11, and 15. I expect many of these teams have more than one coach/mentor with keys to the shop.
I see that some teams are putting in over 40 hours a week during build season, in addition to school and work. I have to ask, are you actually being productive during that time?
It seems to me that at that level of FRC; burn out and drop out rates would increase significantly.
Remember to plan your work and then work your plan.
Thomas Edison:
“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.”
Remember that a failure to plan is a plan for failure.
My team, the Metal Mustangs, officially meets 6-8pm on Monday-Thursday and 9-4ish on Saturdays. In addition, any snow days or holidays are basically the same time frame as Saturdays. We tend to run later than the official times if things need to get done though, and some students often get there earlier on weekdays to get stuff done if necessary.
We really haven’t had too many problems with burnout in my time on the team. We emphasize that schoolwork is still a priority and are pretty flexible if students have conflicts which helps if people need a little break. In addition , Fridays and Sundays are reserved for rest.
As some anecdotal reassurance, a few years ago 1257 cut back from 5-6 days a week with 4 + hour meetings to 3 days a week with meetings that defaulted to 3 hours (but could be extended if needed). We got a lot more done in that time, because there was less burnout and more motivation to get work done.
Build season: we take over the tech ed wing of the HS. Classroom , computer lab, wood shop, metal shop and auto shop.
M-Fri 3:30 - 10:30 (most students leave at 5:30 on the late bus because they do not have their own transportation)
Saturday 10-6
This is for both of our teams.
We have one coach there all the time, 2 are there most of the time and 2 sometimes.
Done!
Sorry for the delay, was out of town for Thanksgiving.
No correlation as far as I know.
Thanks, to both of you!
We are blessed when it comes to our school administrators. We meet T,W,T from 5 to 9 but if a student is willing to stay and work later our mentors usually will also. Weekends tend to be 10 to 10 on Saturday (often staying late) and Sundays I think are 11 to 9 or so.
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This seems to work really well for us:
M-Th: 3:15pm-6:00pm
F: No meeting
Sat: 9:00am-3:00pm
Sun: No meeting
I think it is not realistic to run meetings into the night around 8 and 9pm. This both from a from a safety and logistics issue. When you work that late it is an burden on parents to transport their students and feed them. Additionally, that leaves no time for students to work on academic at home. From a safety point of view having students work with tools when they have been up since 6 or 7am is not ideal.
Remember that participants are students first and robotics members second. Sometimes other things are more important than the robot build.
We generally go Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 6-9. Saturday 12-6
We usually do 2-6 or 7 on school nights, 3-10 on Friday and Saturday, and 3-8 on Sunday.