How do some teams manage having students in two or more sub groups of their team (ex. chairmans and fabrication)
We have a certification system that makes it easy to tell if a given student knows what they’re doing in a given department, and we also ask students to pick a department to focus on during build season. For example, I lead the Chairman’s department, so that’s my main focus, but if we’re in a good place with our stuff and Fab needs help with a job, we’ll go help for a few hours. As a result, we have a ‘normal’ distribution (not a normal distribution like in stats, but whatever) of members across the various departments, but it’s also flexible if one department needs extra hands one day, so we can use the certifications to see who’s able to help, and send them over.
We aren’t limiting on how many sub-teams a student can be on, but students tend to focus either on the robot side or the awards side. Each side generally provides one of our 2 captains.
Most of our build leads can do a vast majority of what it takes to get a robot onto the field, so it isn’t uncommon for them to step in and help in other sub teams if need be.
There have absolutely been exceptions where students did both robot side and awards side, but it isn’t all that common, the time commitment is pretty extreme to do both to their fullest.
Most of our team members stick with one group for most of build season, but a couple of our upperclassmen spend about half of their time “floating” to groups that need help. We do not have any formal way to manage this; the ones who do this are already multitaskers.