How does your team keep track of how much work people put in on the robot? I have heard of teams with time cards and sign up sheets. Do you have a formal tracking method or is it just sort of “everyone knows who is working?”
Are there minimum numbers of hours for going on trips?
my team does an attendance sheet and one of the teachers keeps track of when people arrive and when they leave. then we have this point system and you get a certain number of points for how long you are there. to go on the trips you have to have at least 80 percent.
we tried that, it didn’t work
i’m thinking of either making a C++ program to track everything, or just using Project to do it manually. each has an advantage.
C++ Program -
I just let it run on a computer in the room (we have a few) and everyone can sign in a time x, then before they leave, sign out. everything is automated, and i don’t have to worry about anything. People can falsify hours easier though.
Project -
I have to do all the work, but it’s accurate, and people can’t falsify the hours.
I’m not sure what i’ll do, but i’ll figure something out for next year, cause what we did this year didn’t work.
Wow. what a colossal waste of time and resorces. Why on earth would you want to keep track of time hours? People put in what they want to and what they can. To expect them to do more is ridiculous. To say anyone has done too much is also ridiculous. You cannot get good results by forcing peole to do work in FIRST. Commitment level is not something that needs to be that precicely measured or that should be measured in hours.
Going on trips is based mainly on work hours, but also on grade level, if it your last year you are more likely to get to go etc.
“From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs” as Marx put it.
We didn’t track hours this year, but last year we had an Excel spreadsheet with a few macros for our time tracker. You clicked on the cell for your name for that day, clicked the “current time” button, and it inserted the correct time in the “in” cell. When you left, you did the same thing, but in the “out” cell. The program then calculated the time you were there that day, and added up all the days to give a weekly total. We would then add up all the weeks and find a running total for the year.
It worked great, but our lack of a computer in the woodshop where we worked this year prevented us from doing that this year. We’ll probably bring it back next year, though.
*Originally posted by Wolfe *
**Wow. what a colossal waste of time and resorces. Why on earth would you want to keep track of time hours? People put in what they want to and what they can. To expect them to do more is ridiculous. To say anyone has done too much is also ridiculous. You cannot get good results by forcing peole to do work in FIRST. Commitment level is not something that needs to be that precicely measured or that should be measured in hours.
Going on trips is based mainly on work hours, but also on grade level, if it your last year you are more likely to get to go etc.“From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs” as Marx put it. **
Well you identified why track hours in your post - going on trips. This is probably not an issue if people have to pay their own way, as happened to us this year, but if the team is paying for the trip is it really fair that someone who showed up for an hour a week gets a free trip to Florida?
In general the reason to track hours is to reduce the subjectivity around who gets their way paid on trips. Or who gets the leadership roles for the next year. It’s not to force people to work but to reward those who do.
Having our small team basically means if you value your spot you are DEDICATED to the project, and that means you show up every night (every person who applied was told this far before hand). Granted if they have some huge test the next day just let someone know and its fine, but missing to watch TV or something non-important is COMPLETELY unacceptable, and if you do that too much you might as well kiss your space on the team good-bye. I don’t think its absurd to expect kids to be dedicated to the project, that’s why they wanted on the team right?
Ashley
My team doesn’t keep track of hours. It’s more like we have the
–dedicated (there all the time)
–active (they come, they work, but they aren’t quite as dedicated)
–“so-called” members (they maybe come once or twice, but are far from active)
–inactive (they say “We’re on the FIRST team”, but they have never layed hands on anything having to do with the robot)
As for some type of actual paper noting hours…nah.
*Originally posted by Scorpion515 *
**My team doesn’t keep track of hours. It’s more like we have the–dedicated (there all the time)
–active (they come, they work, but they aren’t quite as dedicated)
–“so-called” members (they maybe come once or twice, but are far from active)
–inactive (they say “We’re on the FIRST team”, but they have never layed hands on anything having to do with the robot)As for some type of actual paper noting hours…nah.
**
I noticed the same thing on our team…
My team has a sign in sign out sheet at every work session we go too…then after the build period one of the more dedicated team members calculate how many hours the person was there compared to how many they should have been.
*Originally posted by Alfred Thompson *
** “everyone knows who is working?”
**
yah, pretty much. Our team is small, but even if it weren’t you can still tell who has been working. They know how the robot works, they do not have mad ping-pong skills, and they usually look rather glassy eyed and have swollen fingers. It’s the same ppl who build the robot, who drive the robot, who fix the robot between matches. It’s not hard to tell. I think we do a good job of including all our students, but you can tell who are the core students even without trying.
We keep track of hours, but it doesnt do much. To go to florida you must have put in 45hours minimum over the 6 week build period. Seeing that i came out of it with 130 charted hours, and about 50 more spent in math class testing algorithms, i wasn’t affected. However, it did have a few benefits. To get credit for the hours an adult mentor had to sign your sheet before you went home. If they felt you hadn’t contributed, they didnt sign. This is why “useless boy” who played freearcade all day wasn’t seen in florida. If i remember corectly the one thing he did this entire season was log on to a computer that i forced him off of so i could do useful stuff. He was a good seat warmer…
*Originally posted by VanWEric *
**We keep track of hours, but it doesnt do much. To go to florida you must have put in 45hours minimum over the 6 week build period. Seeing that i came out of it with 130 charted hours… **
This year we kept track of hours in log books, and students had to have 80% of official team hours to go to Epcot. I think official team hours from October through ship day was somewhere around 200.
Next year we plan to use a program to keep track of hours so the team captain doesn’t have to get all the log books and add up all the hours.
Even though engineers didn’t have to keep track of hours, I wanted to know how many hours I was putting in, and I had about 250 hours by ship day, and of course lots more after regionals, Epcot, and preparing photos for the web.
being the secretary of my team, it’s my job to keep track of stuff like that. i didn’t exactly track hours, but i did have to keep a record of how many days each person attended the meetings. the only purpose of this was to figure out who got to go to florida for nationals. although it was fairly obvious of who did the most work, this just helped to justify it, in case we got any complaints from those not selected to go. this year we were lucky and just enough people were above what was a huge gap in meetings attended. it woudlnt have been pretty if we actually had to eliminate someone because they had been to one meeting too less, the next highest was actually 14 less.
Our team has a problem with slackers, so unfortunately we have to track work hours in order to make sure only the hard working students go. However, some students show up and do no work, but it still shows up the same as my hours of painful and stressful labor. We don’t really have a competent way of combating this except that when the leaders make the decision of who gets to go to nationals they try not to count hours too heavily. This also presents a problem, because of favoritism and the fact that some of our team members are a bit more “rebellious” than some of the people who don’t care about robotics. The people who I hang out with, i feel, are classified as rebellious just because we dislike the way things are being run on the team and we care enough to try to fix it(unlike the “slackers” who are loved by our leaders b/c of their apathy). It was not a problem for me, as the leaders knew I had worked very hard, but there was a student who was not allowed to go to Florida who hangs out with us and who did an incredible amount of work on our Chairman’s award submission. There was a incident where he supposedly did something(of which there was no proof) and because of the politics on our team(the leaders didn’t like him!) he was not allowed to go. Plus, it was his senior year! There were other similar incidents throughout the year(this was probably the most serious). I dont know about you guys but our team has extreme problems with taking hours, but we have extreme problems when we disregard them as well!
Politics Suck!