Posted by Lee Sussman.
Student on team #95, Lebanon Robotics Team, LRT, from Lebanon Highschool and Crrel.
Posted on 4/27/2000 9:30 AM MST
Our team is growing in size. This year, the team was bigger than ever (about 30-35 student members). We ran into a problem, namely this: How do we deal with more people than tasks? What was happening was that we had a few small tightly knit groups working on different projects, usually veterens, and a bunch of ‘floaters’, or people with no specific task, usually new members. These ‘floaters’ more often than not just ended up goofing off and annoying everyone else. We met, and are trying to work out a solution, but we also thought ‘hey, how do those REALLY big teams out there deal with this problem?’ So, if any of u have any suggestions, please post it, or email me at Lifeblood@thefragile.com. Thanx, I hope to hear from you!
Posted by Erin. [PICTURE: SAME | NEW | HELP]
Student on team #1, The Juggernauts, from Oakland Technical Center-Northeast Campus and 3-Dimensional Services.
Posted on 4/27/2000 10:10 AM MST
In Reply to: How do u deal with excess people? posted by Lee Sussman on 4/27/2000 9:30 AM MST:
I HAVE SOME REALLY GOOD SUGGESTIONS.
the more you have, the merrier. also- i noticed that my team was swamped when we tried to take on the chairman’s… a team of 15…
With such a large team, you should start dividing the team into smaller inner teams. Our team has a mechanical team (which focuses primarily on the inner workings of robots, they hold smaller in-class competitions during the sept. to dec. meetings) the animation team (people to decide what is going in to the animation- it is alot less stressful for each student if 5 or so people are on this team, and since they mave to make mutual decisions they learn good teamwork skills), electrical team (this team focuses primarily on electrical systems and the inner workings of the electrical components on robots) the marketing team (this team focuses on the chairman’s award submission, the yearbook for students, flyers, ‘what people want to hear about us’ on the flyers, webpage design and publicity), a strategy team (who get to have all the fun arguing about what srategies should work against who- making a full-fledged playbook this year was fun!) and a cheer team(it is good to have your whole team together working on this). I have noticed that the mechanical team and the marketing team need more focus than the others, so you can always put students into individual jobs on each team. For example on the mechanical team, since we have 2 main areas on the robot, we could have had one team focus on the drive train and what it does and one focus on the turret and life system. and with the marketing team we could have had some studnets focus on the chairman’s award for video, some on the paper presentation, some on what the webpage needs done, some on publicity, some on marketing ideas, some on effective plans of attack when marketing to other teams, some can just work on keeping up with the FIRST community (sharingfirst, first homepage, chiefdelphi, and buzz u. for instance are all areas that each team should check up on regularly). With a team as small as ours, we would really have to stretch ourselve to do all of this (we could do it though!) but I am willing to bet that it would make everything fun for a team of about 30-35.
hope i helped!
-erin