Out of curiosity, I’m wondering how other teams are set up. Like, what sections do you have? Who does what? That sort of thing.
We’ve got what we affectionately call the “FDMMRP”, which is our set-up of subteams: Fabrication, Design, Marketing, Motion, Recon and Programming.
This works alright, but communication is always pretty difficult with a team our size. We’ve got like 40 people this year, which is only a little more than our team of 25 last year.
Our team is also pretty student-run, with our mentors mostly saying “stop that” and helping with some of the machining as well as fundraising. Each mentor usually has a subteam they stick to, also.
The RoboDawGs [216/244/288] have a bit of an interesting setup. To start with, we have 3 teams at one school.
Due to having 3 teams, we have 3 pairs of kids to be captains/co captains at the head of the team [picked by our coaches, one of the many jobs they do for us]. our 60 kids are split among the 3 teams [again, sorted by our mentors]. From there, it is up to the team captains like Teddy and I to determine jobs amongst our team.
For example, our first 2 weeks or so of build season is prototyping. Teddy and I break our 20 kids up into groups of whatever we see that the game might require. We pick “leaders” of those groups, who report to us. Teddy and I walk between them, seeing that work gets done and that everyone is getting hands on and is learning all parts of the robot. We change groups up frequently and let everyone who wants to take charge take charge at some point.
One of the things that our team does is making sure that the new students * get lots of experience, and the hope is that by the end of season, everyone on our teams can be asked about electronics, mechanical, or programming and be able to give you a full explanation or have a very good idea of what is going on. We give everyone a chance to drive and rotate most of the drive team on the field. The only stipulation is that we have one team captain anywhere on the field.*