The one thing that amazed me down at nationals was how large some of these teams are. I think half the reason the awards ceremony was over 2 hours is that it took 10 minutes for one team to get its award. Our team is relatively small 19 students and and 7 adults. Also some teams looked like that had more mentors than students.
We got 38 kids and 31 adults. Not all of them could make it down to Florida(Some of the kids had AP’s coming up and some of the adults passed on comming down). In previous years the X-Cats had upwards of 50+ kids I was told(this was my 1st year) but that was inefficient because too many kids were idle doing nothing. 40 kids is an ideal maximum for us I’m told. I think the mentor number at 30 to 35 is preferred.
We had 83 people at nationals this year. The entire junior class (50 Students) goes down along with some seniors (about 10) teachers, and WPI students. I didn’t really realise how big the team was until we won a judges award. I was one the first people in line and as I went back to our seats which were in the back member from our team were still going down. Our team is over 150 high school students and college students with 1 adult mentor.
Should the count include people who just show up to eat pizza and drink soda?
I don’t know what the ideal number is. It really depends on who does what. You can probably build a robot with 3-4 people. You need 3 kids to run the robot. Those could be the same as the people who build it so you could in theory have a team with 3 kids and some number of mentors.
This was our first year and our team was about 12 kids and 2 adult mentors. At almost every meeting someone wasn’t there, and we still often had someone sitting around waiting for something to do. I personally don’t know what would happen if we had 40 people on our team… probably we’d have 10 people dedicated to managing the team and keeping everyone going… and that just seems silly!
Our team took about 19 students or so to nationals, but we do have a few more…
Our team looked big because the engineers/teachers/parents/and student sibblings outnumbered our team
My team wasn’t at the Nat’s…but we have in total around 25 students involved, and probably 4 or 5 adults.
We hope to get more for next year, esp on the adult side.
My team, Heatwave, used to have like 75 people on it. We had a lot of people that never showed up to work on the bot or knew how the game worked or anything and were just there to have fun and provide “spirit.” This year we knocked the team down to 50 and you had to work to earn your spot on the team. Only about a core group of about 8 people are actually bot builders (Pit Crew) and this includes the drivers, then we have 2 main engineers and one mentor also in the Pit Crew working on the bot. Then about 10 people are really into the strategy part. We have one main person who works with one of the engineers and stays in the pits and goes around to all the teams and works out strategies. Then there are about 7 captains (me being one of them :)) which control teams of 4 which do “strategy sheets” or scouting during the specific matches. The rest of the team is basically spirit. I liked having a smaller team this year as compared to the much larger amounts of the previous years. Really only need about 40 people per team.
YIPPIE FOR SMALL TEAMS!!!
we have 8 highschoolers and around 10 college/grad students (we strive for 10 and 10, but a 2 highschoolers quit during the season) we love our small team and our partnership with the university of tulsa, we had a huge team before but we all really love it being this small, were just all a family 
ashley
the last years everybody could join our team, but now we limited it to 36 students. at the nationals we had around 26 students and 5 mentors/adults. i’m really satisfied with this team size and i don’t want a bigger team, because then you get a lot of people in that don’t do anything. also a samll team compared with these 100-member teams we won a spirit award, sportsmanship award and some spirit awards we got from other teams, without using any noisemakers, except our voices.
daniel
officialy there are 35 students on our team. Only about 15 do something though.
our team has something around 25 students and 10 adults that work the shole six weeks and about 20 of the students ended up traveling to the regional and nationals. But we had trouble keeping 25 people busy so i dont know what the big teams of like 40 kids do.
jessi
How in the world can a team have 90 or more kids???
even more than 20???
What do all these kids do, or do they just go to florida and cheer? They can’t all work on the robot.
Why not just start another team (or 2, or 4, or 6:D )? It seems silly to have a million kids on a robotics team.
Even with 30 kids, the team feels kinda crowded…
We have 35 this year and we realized that is too much…it should only be about 20-25 next year i think…*counts the seniors that are leaving and other random people…*yep…
We started with 25 students in September, but by the time we got to regionals, we were down to 13 students. We also have a few alumni that show up occasionally, 2 teachers (1 really active, 1 not), and several parents.
*Originally posted by Ben Mitchell *
**How in the world can a team have 90 or more kids???even more than 20???**
I have no idea…We had 20 somthing…But even with that probably only like 5-10 actually worked on the bot regularly. We also had 3 or 4 people on our ‘Media Team’ who video taped the stuff and did the animations and chairmans award and stuff.
But seriously, how does a team with 90 people work? What the heck do 90 people do?
Coming from a large team (we sent 63 people down to Florida), I can safely say that there were members of my team that had very little to do with the robot. That doesn’t mean that they did nothing with the team. We had students working exclusively on the web site and animation, and others working on just the artistic parts of the team (t-shirts, noisemakers, etc.), kids working on the Chairman’s Award, and a small team taping parts of the competition for the video. They still contribute, even though they know very little about the robot itself.
Bye the way, the sixty-three also included alumni, teachers, parents, and engineers…i think we had something like 36 actual students-all of whom were at work most of the time.
Our team consists of about 60 students, roughly 30 each from the two schools involved. Because of safety and security concerns, our sponsor only allows us to bring 20 students each to the build site. This seems like a good number for us, but there are problems. Balancing team size and efficiency can be a major problem. naturally we want to be accessible to any students who are interested, but this isnt possible or practical in many instances. We always wind up with students sitting around complaining they have nothing to do. The problem can be made when certain extremely dedicated students tend to monopolize jobs and time(I’m as guilty of this as anyone).
Personally, I think that it doesn’t matter what the size of the team is, there will always be at least one person that doesn’t know what to do or chooses not to do anything on the team (unless there are only 3 students on the team, then jobs aren’t too hard to find). I just get annoyed when people hang out in the pits because they are bored or don’t know what to do and they just end up getting in people’s way.
We only have 13 students. We are a smaller team, but I like it 