There seems to be a ton of conversation around becoming more competitive lately. I think that’s all well and good, winning is good for a lot of programs, but something that I think we’re losing focus on is creating great experiences for the students. It feels like maybe we’re getting caught up in the wrong things? I personally feel like I have fallen victim to this mindset a decent amount, I’d like to change that.
I really think we could benefit from shifting the organizational mindset from banners=quality. Tons of great orgs that have stellar student experiences that may not be super competitive.
I’d love to hear from some teams that feel like they have good student experiences and how they go about accomplishing that. It’s something I’m spending a lot of time thinking about and from my perspective might be an even more difficult goal than consistently winning.
What are some things your team does that you love? What are some habits, structures, systems that you all use that you feel really positively make a difference in having a great program for your students? I’d love these to be independent of competitive success.
Love this topic because I often feel that when students feel disconnected from the ownership of the success/failure outcome it can impact their motivation and the educational outcome.
Sometimes the teams with the hungriest students are right on the competitive bubble and they are hungry because they know what it means to lose.
I think that as a mentor it can be tempting to put your finger on the scales to affect the outcome positively and protect your students from failure but sometimes that actually is detrimental to the students learning journey.
I’ll try to write more later but just to kick this off. One of my philosophies is that winning doesn’t matter as in the actual outcome, the important thing about wanting to be competitive is the desire to win, it’s the trying to win. It’s the trying to do something that is really hard with a purpose, with a target the entire team can rally around. Like Woodie said the robot is the campfire the tribe gathered around and wanting to be successful (on and off the field) is part of that.
The goal is trying to win and win in a way that everyone on your team and in your community can be proud of. Some of that also means wanting the best for everyone in FIRST, so sharing more, building others up, and knowing that the work we do on our team has a greater positive impact on the world.
In general, I know we can’t always make our team a great experience for every single student that expresses any interest in robotics, many of them are better served doing some other team/club at our school and that’s okay. We take feedback from our students constantly, listen to our student leaders as much as possible, try new things to bring the team together, make it more welcoming, etc. I also try to remember what it was like to be a student on an FRC team and be the coach I would want when I was a student. Not any one of those things is more important than then the other and we are far far from perfect but we always working to improve the team in variety of ways.
Competitive is correlated, not causal, to a quality student (and mentor for that matter) experience.
On the extremes arrogance and constant beat-downs are negative to the experience.
I want to underscore all I have said above is not in absolute terms, but rather in relative terms. Even if you are a regular mid field team, seeding first at an event is extremely powerful. On the flipside being a pretty good team that misses out on champs divisions elims can be pretty feelsbad if you approach it arrogantly.
I like to think I put student experience in the short/medium term first, and student success and team sustainability first in the longterm. A good part of that is competitiveness, overcoming odds, recognition of effort etc.
As far as “quality” goes. There is something to be said for the lessons learned and " we did that the best" bragging rights at an event (fastest climb, most bomb proof auto, etc) even if the bot isn’t winning banners.
During my time with FRC 1351, we managed to vastly increase the competitiveness of the team, however being the most competitive team was never the goal. My goal was, and will continue to be to create the best engineers / professionals the world has ever seen. I may not be able to make the best robots, but I think I can guide a team towards creating the best people.
Personally, I’ve always found competitiveness as one of many measures of how good your engineering program is. Being competitive does not make a good engineering program, but a good engineering program can lead to competitiveness. You need more than just a competitive team to prove you’re succeeding as a program, but it can be an indicator that you’re on the right track.
The difficulty is finding which metrics to evaluate your program by. What does “successful engineering program” mean? I don’t have all the answers, but the approach I’ve used to evaluate the team I am working with has grown to include the following metrics:
Are the team members (students, mentors, parents, community, etc) having fun with our team? Are they proud to be recognized as part of our program?
Are our students graduating as competent and desired members of society who will go off and do good in the world (are companies fighting to get them? Do other teams really want our alumni as mentors?)?
Are our students doing well at whatever college / career they decide to pursue once they’ve left (have we made them good at what they do)?
Are we demonstrating that we are a technically capable program both on and off the field (competitive in matches and technically impressive with all aspects we pursue)?
Do our students graduate with a positive enough experience in our robotics program that they wish to continue participation with STEM education programs like competitive robotics in the future (this is a big one - I know many smart people from good FRC teams who want nothing to do with STEM education or competitive robotics after graduating, and I see this as a problem).
Of course I’ll say take this all with a grain of salt, as I’ve yet to run a nationally recognized STEM program, but I think these metrics have been helpful in evaluating my own personal pursuit towards that goal. YMMV.
I often like to think about this from a voice of the customer perspective, meaning that your students are your customer, and your educational experience is your product.
One major initiative I spearhead on my team has definitely helped me to understand some things about our team that I wasn’t aware of.
Each year we conduct both entrance and exit interviews with all our students. Entrance interviews are brief goal setting conversations to set expectations with the following questions:
What did you learn during our offseason training?
What do you expect your role to be on the team this season?
What is one SMART goal that we can agree on for you to achieve by the end of next build season?
Exit interviews are more in depth and aim to unpack the students experience from their perspective. It is here that we try to measure our organizations performance.
This can be challenging because what works for one student doesn’t always work for another, and it’s actually really difficult to find true north when you have multiple student experiences generating conflicting guidance. Having these conversations on a one and one basis can often help you to adjust your approach for specific students as much as reasonably possible. So far, these conversations have helped me keep a loose finger on the pulse of the organization, but the students haven’t seemed to buy into these conversations as much as I expected. I hope it will come with time.
We also ask our students to identify negative experiences during the year so we can focus on rectifying them.
During several of these conversations I discovered that some of the girls on our team often felt their ideas were not heard and they were shot down by male students during group discussions. Since then, I have learned to make an increased effort to support and amplify female voices on our team and immediately challenge male students when I feel they are dismissing a valid opinion from a female student. We didn’t have that sentiment show up in our exit interviews this year, but we will continue monitoring to make sure this is consistent.
I think we’re really hitting on something important here!
At Team Rembrandts 4481, we’ve definitely experienced the tension between striving for competitive success and ensuring that our students have valuable, enriching experiences.
And you’re right—winning can sometimes overshadow the true purpose of programs like FIRST.
Keeping Students Engaged Beyond High School
As a team, we try to keep our high school students engaged long after they leave for university. Many of them study in Eindhoven, where our team is based, and we work to retain their involvement through internships with our partnering companies. We hope that, by supporting them through their studies and into their careers, they’ll stick to the team and become excellent mentors for 4481, paying it forward along the way.
Over the past few seasons, this has worked out really well—students have become so capable by the time they turn 19 that they don’t want to leave! (Too well actually currently where it’s difficult to strike the right student-mentor balance but growing FTC and FRC will help with “moving” more alumni/mentors to important volunteer roles in the community as well)
Balancing competitive success with this approach is challenging, but when executed well, it carries huge potential. We’ve realized that success isn’t just about the banners—it’s about preparing students for the future.
Purpose-Driven Mentorship and Situational Leadership
One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that successful mentorship is both task-relevant and relationship-relevant. At Team Rembrandts, we try to apply a situational leadership approach, which is based on adapting our style to the specific needs of each student. (Hersey-Blanchard Situational leadership)
Mentorship requires fluidity. There’s no single leadership style that fits all situations—mentors need to be adaptable. For example, we might adopt a more directive approach with a new student who’s at a low competence and low commitment, offering detailed instructions and close supervision.
But for a more experienced student or mentor with high competence and high commitment, we shift to a delegating style, where they have control over decision-making and we step back to support as needed.
It’s all about finding that balance, but once mastered this skill you’re the ultimate mentor for every student within your own domain.
Community and Collaboration: Paying It Forward
Our team is also heavily involved in the FTC programs we run in collaboration with STEAMup and FTC Benelux. The majority of FTC volunteers in the Benelux are Team Rembrandts members, and we frequently host playground sessions for FTC teams and other outreach activities.
This community-building aspect is key for us. It’s not just about what we achieve on the field; it’s about the lasting impact we can create by nurturing the next generation of leaders, both within our team and the broader FIRST community.
Creating opportunities for our members to take responsibilities in those non-robot related projects is a great way to teach them mentor-skills outside of their comfort zone since the members involved are from a super broad spectrum. (Competence and commitment wise)
Reflection and Growth: Beyond the Robot
After every competition or major event, we hold structured debriefs. These aren’t just about the robot’s performance—they focus on the students’ experiences, what they’ve learned, and how they’ve grown. This process helps us ensure that each student feels fulfilled and supported, even if we don’t win every competition. The conversations during these debriefs often lead to key insights that shape how we mentor and lead in the future.
This flows into our workshop and regular team meetings as well. I must say that @Tamar has been an amazing mentor and addition to our management team in order to take this to another level since 2023. With implementing and sustaining a buddy-system for our students, staying in touch with everyone’s vibes and keeping mentors sharp on their sub-department members.
Building great teams goes far beyond winning—it’s about empowering students to take on real-world challenges, cultivating their leadership potential, and creating an environment where they can grow.
By meeting them where they are and guiding them with mentorship, we foster a culture of curiosity, collaboration, and purpose that prepares them not just for competition, but for life.
I’d love to hear how other teams are tackling this balance because it’s something I think we can all benefit from.
I love this section, as it hits on one of the things that I find beautiful about the overall structure of FRC: we find a ready made common enemy (all the other teams) while still exhibiting GP and effusively helping other teams outside of the short 2m30s sessions when you’re trying your best to beat them on the field fairly and with integrity. Then you go right back to helping them get better (and vice versa).
We put a HUGE emphasis on building our robots as robustly as possible, often maxxing out the size and weight limits and spending sometimes 2 weeks on electrical alone.
I personally love doing this, it makes any mechanical or electrical issues super easy to diagnose and fix, as well as teaching us robust construction techniques. The tricky part though, is despite us winning quality (or similar) awards most years, this last year (2024) we won our first blue banner. also this last year, it was the first time we did not max out the size and weight limits (to my knowledge). our robot often will not perform to the same caliber as some top teams, but it dosent often fail us, and if it does, its incredibly easy to fix.
One of the values I find my team holds is that competition does not matter until you’re there. of course we try our hardest to build a robot that can succeed and we prepare ouselves as much as possible, but we recognize that competition is a means to an end; A way to prepare us students for a future/career worth bragging about.
With my team, even though we may not perform exceptionally, the concepts that first aims to teach are working and that is what is important.
To answer the original question (as a student), our team provides unique student leadership opportunities. Because we have very few (1 or none) technical mentors, we (students) are able to develop leadership and teamwork skills, while also creating and managing schedules and deadlines ourselves. We are also required to learn how to learn, which is another effect of little tech mentor involvement (Thanks to everyone who posts on CD, our team is so much better because of you). Our FLL and FTC mentoring is also student-led, which is a lot of fun. I wouldn’t call this structure good nor bad, but it certainly has provided an experience I wouldn’t find elsewhere.
I do think, to an extent, competitiveness enhances quality. We have failed to reach champs each of the past three years, and it is difficult to start dcmp playoffs optimistically and then suffer two close losses everysingleyear. Losing is tiring, and regardless of whether you think quality or competitiveness is more important, it always stinks. I think teams should focus more on quality than competitiveness, but I’d be lying if I said I’d rather have a high-quality robot than attending worlds.
I really like this thread, and I’m excited to read how other teams balance these two seemingly conflicting goals. I enjoyed reading how @AllenGregoryIV and 3847/8515 create experiences while setting realistic goals. Those guys seem miles ahead in everything they do.
Jumping in on a topic that I have no qualifications whatsoever to be speaking on. But reading this thread made me realize that for a lot of teams competitiveness is seen as the most important measure of success, and that interested me because for my team it isn’t really at all. Part of this might have to do with the fact that we’re not anywhere near a worlds-level team, but I do think part of it is the way we approach leadership, recruitment, and culture.
So how do we measure success if not through competitiveness? I think it comes down to the “we build people not robots” thing. We measure success in the people who might not have gotten interested in engineering if it wasn’t for us. A group of students with preexisting passion and prior engineering experience can make quite the competitive team, and FRC can help them dive into some super advanced topics. They win some amazing titles; they’ll likely go on to become successful engineers. But they probably would have also gone into engineering without FRC.
There’s a second category of students. The ones who think they might be interested in engineering, but lack confidence and/or don’t have prior experience. They hesitate to join a super-competitive robotics team because they think they’ll surely be judged for not knowing anything. But say they come across an FRC team where they’re welcomed, encouraged, taught at a pace that works for them no matter their starting point. They join, they fall in love with it, they learn, and when they graduate they pursue engineering careers. That’s a life path completely changed. (and yes, I fall into this category).
I’m not trying to suggest by any means that the second category should be prioritized at expense of the first – this isn’t a zero-sum game. What I am saying is that it is so much less common that students who fall into the second category end up joining the engineering side of things. And unfortunately from what I’ve noticed, many of these students seem to be girls. If there’s anything that I’ve learned from leading my team, it’s that there is always more to be done on this front. How many girls are in stands during competitions because they don’t feel they “belong” in pits? How many don’t become active on the team at all?
Starting young
As an aside – getting more kids introduced at an early age through feeder programs like FLL is a great start, since FLL is more geared towards inclusion than competition. But FLL experience doesn’t always translate to FRC confidence – there is a huge confidence drop somewhere along the early high school years. I did 5 years of FLL and loved it, but it didn’t help me an ounce when I walked into my FRC team’s workshop without ever having touched a drill before. So I think there is still a pressing need to be actively inclusive in FRC.
So, my FRC team prioritizes building up these students’ confidence. Our recruitment and training process is by no way good, of course (pretty limited mentor availability so everything is student-run), but we really try to make it inclusive. There are only so many units of time that a team can devote to something, and we choose to devote a lot of it to actively reaching out to the inexperienced students, the unconfident students, holding fourteen personalized versions of the same training if it works better for them. This probably hurts our competitiveness, but again – that isn’t our priority. Winning, or even being very technically advanced, isn’t the only draw of FRC. A team community supportive of learning can itself be a draw too. (I could yap on about the tiny details we agonize over when it comes to shaping an inclusive and tight-knit community, but I’ve already gone on too long…is anybody actually reading this?)
One last reason I think inclusiveness shapes student experience. Here’s what I’m going to remember while pursuing engineering in the future: Going from mixing up nuts and bolts in freshman year to technical lead in my junior year. Working with students with no prior experience and seeing them grow in confidence in CAD/electrical/programming/mechanical. Bringing the team from me being the only active female member to being 3x the size with every technical subteam at over 50% girls.
What I’m not going to remember in the future: Finalists at Greater Boston 2023. Innovation in Control at DCMP 2024. Sure, it felt nice in the moment, but what has actually shaped me as a person has been discovering my passion for engineering, and in turn working to make my team a place that builds up people who start where I did.
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I have probably either managed to say something controversial or failed to actually answer the OP’s question (if so, apologies). But yeah, hope this slightly different perspective is helpful.
My team is by no means a good team, generally were below average in terms of EPA and where we rank in our district, but I feel as though I still get out so much from being on my team. One of the biggest thing is that our mentors step back and let us do all our work, we have a total of three mentors, one who helps with the tools and financial stuff, one who helps with half of programming (robot code half, not vision half) and one that helps our design subteam, our mechanical sub team and our electrical subteam out and help teach people who to do things, once build season starts we’re basically on our own. Even our drive coach is always a student, sometimes one of our team captains sometimes (and generally) a senior who was on the drive team before. Being such a student run team means that yes we might not do as well as some teams but I feel like we get so much more out of it.
I’ve been known to make the following analogy. All FRC teams are heading for the same destination. But they take different roads.
Some - those with the fortune to live in affluent, tech heavy places - are driving on a smooth, level road…and in a BMW. Note that it is possible to drive a BMW very badly and end up in a ditch.
Other teams are limping along on a dirt road full of potholes and uphill to boot. FIRST is getting better, but I admit, it still does not feel as if the recognition always factors in the difficulty. But, that’s how it is in the real world.
On our team the philosophy is, and will remain:
Highest priority is the students learning things that will be helpful to them in life.
Winning is good, as it is the community recognizing the quality of your efforts. Enjoying the experience is good. (And btw, that is not the same as having fun all the time. Prevailing, or at least gamely trying, in the face of adversity is a very satisfying experience and fits with our Prime Directive nicely.)
Regards “starting young”…5826 actually has our build space in our District’s middle school. Great visibility to the upcoming talent and frankly it is a better work space for us. And, nothing wrong with FLL and FTC, but I agree that they don’t prep you for FRC in an ideal sense. So we make up and run our own middle school level programs. We do an occasional cryptography/problem solving class called Enigma, and this brings us some very clever people. But our main effort is Robot School, an after school program where 5826 members and mentors work with 7th and 8th graders to build something fun with FRC parts. Here’s a bit on this year’s iteration, the KoP frame, retractable intake and such are at least FRC concepts. I think it will harvest whiffle balls…and if that’s a game piece somehow I’ll feel very…prophetic. Detritus of Empire: Robot School 2024
if you have a team small enough to do it (like we do), i would say that making major design/team decisions as a full team really makes it feel like you (as a student) actually get a say on what the team does. it also helps students learn to share their input on things, and be able to learn to talk in groups.
it also helps the team in a competitive sense because instead of one student making a rash decision on something, everyone get a say on it and it cultivates good design.
This. I probably learned more from the failures and shortcomings of our 2022, 2023, and 2024 robots than I might have learned if we had been more competitive and made fewer mistakes. Even now, where we’ve managed to get closer to the “bubble”, we still make mistakes all the time that might not have happened with more involved mentors, but those mistakes are amazing in helping us learn. Also, being right on the edge of that competitive bubble (Made it to match 13 as an alliance captain after 3 years of seeing no playoffs) was a great experience and inspired us to work harder.
I pushed hard for us to do a “rookie bot” this offseason (a simple robot designed and built without any substantial involvement by leads and mentors, aside from answering questions) because I think that it’s incredibly valuable for them to go through the process making mistakes and learning from them. Even though it won’t ever see a competition, it’s already been amazing to see them advance as they’ve been working on it. While we probably could have put together the resources for a much more ambitious and competitive off-season robot, I find the value of letting our younger members take charge and make mistakes on their own outweighs the value our team would have gotten by trying to build something else.
FRC is a competition, where a team can have luck and/or can have great build quality , strategy , scouting and training to succeed at that competition. This is a quality experience because as a team you did something very hard. A trip to the Worlds can have a great effect on that team. Also gives the students pride in what they accomplished.
I get the other points of view in concentrating on Engineering skills and other skill sets and responsibilities . That’s great too. In the end we are preparing the students for real life where the will always face competition. So this is a great program to get them to start to learn how one does a very difficult task and succeeds against their peers.
The way you scale Mt. Everest , is one footstep at a time and some good luck.
8033 hasn’t won any events, but my four years on this team have made me more proud of our program than I can put into words.
This speaks to me the most. We’re entirely student-led and student-designed. We still have no mentors who are experienced with FRC design and when we were founded, we were working out of a two car garage.
We have our fair share of issues, sure, but the defining characteristic across the student culture is the universal desire to catch our failures and shortcomings and overcome them year over year. We certainly have a long list of learnings from 2024 to get through, but we also have a ton of students that are ready to take on implementing and standardizing those solutions.
So to me, it’s not about winning, or even having incredible outreach or training - it’s about institutional growth. It’s about making strategic changes and seeing the results of those changes on and off the field. It’s about working towards a more sustainable program.
The best part about this is that the goal is always attainable. You don’t need seeding luck or good division placement at champs to show improvements in those areas - the important thing is to really care and go above and beyond to address prior failures.
At the end of the day, we still set concrete goals for our season (can we please win a banner ) but I think what makes a strong program and welcoming student culture is really more fundamental then that, and ultimately transcends anything that a team does in any individual season.
) but I think what makes a strong program and welcoming student culture is really more fundamental then that, and ultimately transcends anything that a team does in any individual season.