I have been with team 706 for going on 10 years now. We have become increasingly more successful. This is partly due to learning how things best work on an FRC robot and putting in at least 25 hours a week during build season and nearly that many hours a week before our first competition.
I thought it would be nice for all of us to find out how many hours most teams put in per week of build season. I am not asking how many hours some individuals work but rather how many hours the team is allowed to work under team/school guidelines.
I did some searches and could not find a thread that addressed this in one place so here is a poll.
Thanks
We don’t have any guidelines. It varies from student to student on our team. We had several students put in 70+ in week 1 of last year during prototyping. It tapers down after that but it stays above 40 hours for a least a few of them.
Also no universal guidelines. If you come every time the shop is open, you’d break 40 easily, particularly towards the end. A few people do that some weeks, but for most of us 40hr+, a good chunk is CAD or LabVIEW. (Plus a few students and a mentor spend significant time at a sponsor’s shop.) The median is probably in the 25 +/- 5 range. That’s 3 of the 5 nights at 3hrs and then the 8hr weekends, or the like.
We are limited on how long the permits let us work in the scholl. The maximum we can do is about 4 hours a night on weekdays, and 8 hours on saturday. We sometimes eke a little bit of extra time out earlier and later than our meeting times here and there, so I’d say a maximum UPS workweek is 30-32 hours.
I am somewhat jealous but also relieved that we don’t have an external shop with unlimited time 
We schedule 8 hours on Saturdays and three hours on Mondays with open extra hour the rest of the week except Fridays.
We’re scheduled for 26 hours per week. It often ends up being at least 10 more than that. Toward the end, we had a week that was about 68 hours.
We had students that logged over 400 hours between November and March.
Team 33 schedules 22 hours per week with our students during the build season. Our leadership and core students will typically put in considerably more than this, I would estimate average at about 36 hours/week or so. This is time where we are actually together at our build site. There is also a lot of individual time put on doing things like CAD, software, Website, documentation, etc outside of the actual on-site work.
This works for us, I have found more time in the shop can be counter-productive, and we must balance planning/designing with building/testing.
Too much of one will hinder the other, and we have a small leadership group so we need to share time between these two domains.
1741 only schedules 24.5 hours per week [2.5 hours M-F, 8 Sat, 4 Sun], but there is often work going on for an extra hour M-Th, and a few more on Friday night, with Saturday and Sunday having more room for expansion. Because there’s 2 Monday holidays in there, we usually have extra time in week 3 and the day before bag day. So I’m usually at the school 40+ hour during those 6 1/2 weeks, but we have kind of a bathtub shape average for time with a lot of hours in the first and last week.
Looking at the poll and then reading responses I wonder if the respondents who listed more than 30 hrs for** the team **really meant that a few core members work more than 30 hrs.
We schedule more than 20 hrs a week and a few people put in a lot extra, so I clicked less than 30 hrs.
The answer I was really trying to get to was how many hours is your work area/school open for working on the robot during build season. I realize some students will put in more than others. I am just looking for available time.
Thanks
rereading the poll question I realize it was not properly worded. However, in that light lets keep it going as is to see what we get.
In our team, we work as much as we possibly can. That means, at any time where we have access to the shop and our allowed to work, except in the middle of the night (because of sleep + adult supervision is usually a teacher that doesn’t actually care about the team).
We’re not allowed to work during school, which ends at 4PM, and we leave at 10PM usually on weekdays (sometimes later).
On Fridays we’re only allowed to work to 4PM (because of sabbath), and start at 9am.
On saturdays we work 10AM to 10PM (we’re not supposed to be allowed but we found a way around it that involves parents).
So all and all, we work 6*5+7+12=49 hours a week.
Also varies student to student for CRT 306. However as a team we usually average 40-45 hours a week. (5 Mon-Fri, 12 Sat) We keep Sunday as a day off for our students to study, spend time with family, etc.
For most of the build season, we schedule about 18 hours per week (6-9 PM Monday, 4:30-9:00 PM Tuesday & Thursday, 8 AM-2 PM Saturday). Some students and mentors will end up spending more like 25-35 hours per week. Kickoff week and the weekend leading up to Stop Build Day are usually >40 hours, the later greatly depending on how much work remains to be done.
The last few years we’ve had a build season shop schedule with 23 “official” shop hours per week, plus a couple of additional six-hour days on the MLKJr and President’s Day school holidays. Unofficial shop hours will sometimes double or even triple that as the Stop Build deadline approaches.
There are a bit more than thirty defined shop sessions during the six weeks, plus a few more after Stop Build, and a student must be productive during at least half of them in order to be eligible to travel with the team. If students can find a pair of mentors to supervise them, only one thing stops them from putting in as much time as they want. The teachers try to keep track of grades, and students will be told to go home and study if they’re not doing their part to maintain acceptable grades.
Our team starts at 10 hours a week and works our way up to 15 hours a week.
We schedule 3 hrs on Tuesday and Thursday and then 8 hours on Saturday. This usually runs over a little bit and towards the end of build season we will schedule more for select groups of students and mentors to ensure completion and driver practice.
For the teams that work 40+ hours a week, do you really find it being that beneficial? I feel that with our team working a max of about 16 hours a week during the standard build season we field incredibly competitive robots and if we added more hours we would burn out and just lose productivity.
Well, our schedule is like this
6:00 - 9:30 Monday thru Thursday (14 hours)
Saturday 9:00 am to 5:00 pm (8 hours)
Sunday 11:00 am to 9:00 pm (10 hours)
for a total of 32 hours.
However, many students work on the robot from 7:00 to 7:45 am, during school, study halls, and lunch, and after school for an hour or so. Also, as the build season progresses, we end up using as much time as the school lets us, which is
6:00-10:30 Monday thru Thursday (18 hours)
Saturday 9:00 to 9:00 (12 hours)
Sunday 9:00 to 9:00 (12 hours)
for a total of 42 exhausting hours
(even more if we meet at a mentors house, or if it’s a 3-day weekend).
If we did this often, we would all die, so this only happens usually on weeks five and six.
After bag/tag, our team usually doesn’t meet for 5 days, as we all need to spend time with our families, jobs, and homework, before they start getting too angry at us.
Could we build a robot in less time, yes. Would our team be nearly as close to each other as we are and would we be able to help as many other teams, probably not. We’re also exchanging time for other resources that we don’t have like lathe and mill access. Like I said this isn’t the entire team, last year around 5 students probably put in that amount in most weeks and that’s time with the team, they’re not always working on the robot.
The way our team runs, I don’t leave until the last student does (as in there are no set end times to our meetings) and normally I’m their later working on things like the blog, ordering parts, helping other teams over email, and reading CD.
By my count, my team has around 20 “scheduled” hours for meetings (significantly more the first couple weeks-- ~30-35), but our schedule doesn’t count the considerable amount of students who come in at 9AM on Saturday and don’t leave until it’s Sunday. I’d say the team average for “shop time” is around 25-30 hours, with some members pushing that up to 40+.
If we’re counting non-shop time I think it would be a little bit scary to see what number that ended up as.
To be honest, thus far we haven’t noticed our robot performance go up with more hours, mostly because we haven’t really held to any sort of schedule or had any strategic plan that we held to throughout the season. Time can only get you so far. The extra time mostly goes towards getting everyone on the team comfortable with each-other.