My school wants to limit my robotics team to three days a week and for about 10 hours in total. I am trying to work out a schedule that will get my team more time and days. Can people tell me their team and what their schedule is looking like your team size and your amount of mentors? I want to show my school’s administration some data so they will see what needs to happen.
Additionally, We currently have two mentors, who are both new to mentoring FIRST teams (one mentor is a FIRST alum), and our team is pretty inexperienced. We have maybe eight people who will show up consistently. I feel like we would need more time to make up for this.
Please fill out this form so we have concrete stats to show our school.
Team stats:
About 16 kids, three technical mentors plus a few more when scheduling allows (build field elements help here and there), 20ish hours a week, we are competitive in elims (reaching finals, ranking well).
If fighting with the school, I would happily take 4 meetings a week of 4 hours as a “we will be competative” schedule for the majority of the build season. I think 16 hours a week (assuming pre season prep went smooth) is very workable, but the team culture cannot be one where people are screwing around.
Build simple, decide on something reasonable robot-wise early on, and make sure everyone is contributing
10 hours a week is tough. That is not a lot of practice for a team. Don’t be afraid to break out the football team analogy, 10 hours a week is likely the minimum for them before you consider extra time in the weight room.
I would push for 4 days a week @ 4 hours at least. Ten is not quite enough if everything is happening in the shop.
Edit: I am quite amazed at the immediate cross section of team sizes in the first few posts)
Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays 3-5; Saturdays 9-4. 14 hrs/week for 6 weeks (we build to the FRC1741-hosted Scrimmage which is traditionally Presidents’ Day Weekend), then 1-2 days/week as needed.
This year we expect to have 35 students and 7 mentors.
5675 is a medium-sized team with about 25-30 students and 6 or so dedicated mentors. During build season, we typically meet twice a week for three hours per night and 6 hours on Saturdays for a total of about 12 hours per week. Crunch time usually gets us closer to 20 hours per week, but we try to avoid that as much as possible.
And, if you are wondering, I would say that we are a moderately competitive team. Not a powerhouse team that regularly wins events, but pretty decent. So, more time does not equal better team.
During the off-season (April/May through December) we meet one day a week from 3pm to 8pm.
During the build and competition season (January through April/May) we meet M-W-F-Sa. Weekday meetings are from 4-9pm and Saturday meetings are from 9am-4PM.
As we get father along into build season, not everyone is needed to meet on every day.
Also–our meetings are directly after school but during the off season we give students a half hour of homework time before the meeting. During build season, we give them 2 hours of homework time before each meeting.
Additionally, we always prioritize academics over robotics so kids who are struggling in school or who just need to take additional time to ensure successful academic performance can do so.
OP, I wouldn’t underestimate using a half hour study hall before the meeting as a bargining chip, it also buys time for mentors to get there. This was more or less the case when I was a student in 2011-2014. Just need to make sure you are having an honest effort in enforcing this.
I don’t think I ever had much actual "home"work when using this chunk of time.
Our official practice schedule during season is Monday, Tuesday and Thursday for 2 hours after school, and then Saturday from 10 to 4. We have 1.5 mentors there every day of week, then 3+ on Saturday. Student time is flexible depending on commitment level and years on team. In reality, I am there 4+ hours on weekdays after school and then leave at 8 or 9 PM on Saturdays. A few students are there until I kick them out. We don’t require everyone to be there that much, but a few are interested in that commitment.
100%. Kids can wait in our Internet Cafe and work on their homework until one of us can get there. Although honestly, a lot of them use it as an opportunity to run to the CVS down the street for some Monster and junk food.
In the past when i have had limits on team meetings in person, I typically arranged items of note into physical and non-physical tasks. You can spend 8 hours designing a blueprint and it’ll optimize your 2 hours in the shop making a subassembly. Take a look at what your team wants to achieve this year (practice elements, drive base, mechanism A, endgame mechanism, arm/elevator) and figure out where things can be done online. Code only needs an hour a week to test until the robot is done. Robot can be simplified so it only takes 30 hours in theory to make (add 25% to everything as executing these plans might not be smooth) and bam, you have a complete robot or game piece or robot cart on time. Business teams and awards or media can meet remotely for the most part, freeing up time for fabrication and assembly. YMMV and good luck!
We meet 6 days a week during build season. 5-8+ M-F, and 8-4 on Saturday.
We are ~30 students and ~15 mentors. We schedule every day because we know our students have many other activities they are a part of, so we are not expecting them at robotics all 6 days, but meeting every day gives them flexibility to do other things and still do robotics (eg Jazz Band meets Monday night, church is Wed eve, SciOly meets Thursday eve, etc) So this example person might be at robotics Tues, Thurs, Fri & Sat. Someone else might be at robotics Mon, Wed, and Sat.
Team 342 in North Charleston, SC
Members 29 students (including 1 homeschooled)
1 Faculty Advisor
8 Mentors (including teacher)
Build Season Schedule:
Monday - Thursday 4:15 pm - 7:30 pm**
Saturday 9:00 am - 4:00 pm
After the first week of build season we divide the team into an A team & B team. A team meets Mon & Wed; B team meets Tues & Thurs; entire team meets on Saturdays.
Off Season:
Every other week: Thursday 4:15 pm - 7:00 pm & Saturdays 9:00 am - 1:00 pm
Our off-season is June - December
When we have an off-season event, meeting frequency will increase for robot repairs/updates and drive practice.
**School ends at 4:00 pm
We meet on campus in a robotics designated shop
We have about 12 students and 6 mentors. During build/comp we meet M,W,Th from 5-8 and Sat from 10-2 or 10-4 for aprox. 13-15 hours a week, with some additional hours with ambitious students towards the end of build season. In terms of timing with robot build I would say that this schedule gave us a good amount of time with design, build and finally programing before our week 2 comp last season.
With only 8 students and 2 mentors though, I can see you really struggling with only 10 hours a week. If this is how it ends up having to be, you are really going to have to push to make sure that students are using the provided time to work and minimize any goofing around. Creating a gantt chart with the team to help show what deadlines the team needs to be meeting can help keep a team on schedule.
Hey, I’m on a team that has had a lot of recent success. We have about 30-40 members each year with a contributing core of about 10 people and about 4-5 mentors full time. We meet 13 hours a week in season, but later in the year, it’s not unusual for a couple people to stay late and do up to 30+ hours a week. We work out of our school’s band room and our lead mentor is a teacher, so we’re really lucky with our setup.
Relatedly - people think of time not spent at meetings as wasted time, but if you only meet a few times a week, you can spend the time between meetings organizing and planning so that when you get to a meeting you can hit the ground running.
I find it’s extremely valuable to do design work from home and then show up to meetings with drawings and files ready to build prototypes, rather than doing the design work at your limited meeting time.
We currently have 46 students on roster and ~10 mentors (it varies, since some of them are college students so they’re at meetings more sporadically than the older mentors.) We meet six days/week during competition season: M-F 4-7 (that is, we start just after the school day ends) and 9-5 on Saturdays. Our shop is in our school, so starting the school day meetings that early works for us. That’s just official meeting times, though, since the design team often does work outside of those times, there are leadership meetings (virtual) and other activities that individuals or small groups will work on elsewhere (grant writing, marketing and outreach, etc.). So we do at least 23 hours a week of official meetings plus a lot of other hours during the season. And this is what we’ve found is necessary to turn out a really competitive robot.
Monday 1 hr, Tuesday-Thursday 5 hr per day, Saturday-Sunday 8 hr a day, total ~32 hours a week during build season, sometimes more, sometimes less.
Most of our students don’t attend all those days but some do. We have an enforced attendance expectation of ~10-15 hours per week across a roughly 50 person team.
3-6 dedicated mentors, depending on the day. We have no teacher sponsor or anyone from the school we are working out of.
~50 students across both teams. Close to a 50/50 split
During the off-season, we meet Monday and Wednesday, 4-7. There’s an hour between when school lets out and the start of our meetings for students to travel from other schools, work on homework, and allows time for mentors to arrive
In season, we meet MWF from 4-7 and Saturdays 10-4. Additional meetings are called as needed and students and mentors are active virtually during non-meeting days planning for the next meeting
Properly scoping the work for us has been very beneficial. Knowing the limits of the team and what we’re capable of, has driven our success. It also allows us to get plenty of drive practice and auton practice. Letting our controls students have multiple weeks to tune autos has been critical for us and is baked into our schedule from the beginning of the build season
Old Build/Competition season schedule (2013-2022): Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays 6pm-9pm (sometimes ran late, especially with Bag & Tag). Saturday’s 9am - 5pm. Averaging 17 hours a week, with some additional days of w fell behind schedule.
Newer Build/Competition season schedule (2023-2024): Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 6:30pm-9pm (sometimes ran late, but not as often). Saturday’s 9am - 5pm. Averaging 15.5 hours a week. Not a big change, but we pushed the start time back to help people arrive on time after their parents got off work.
Current Schedule (tbd with new students): Two weeknights 6:30pm - 9:00pm (all people gone by 9 or outside of the lab, no more waiting around for super late pickups) and Saturday Noon - 5pm. The biggest push for this change was a lack of team funds/permission to use team funds to buy food, and parents not signing up for lunches, so I was buying food for the students on Saturdays over and over again… Not fun so now no more meetings where there is a meal period. We will drop one weeknight as well because with 3 last season we would get good attendance on 2/3 weeknights and have one night where one or two students were there, but everyone else was missing. It was not productive when the other 18 people have the information you need to work and can’t contact them in time or didn’t finish their portion yet so you sit there for nothing.
Now we will only have 10 hours a week on three different days like your school is pushing for. Will this work out well? No idea, it’s new to us, but we will probably make cuts in how much we ‘chew off’ and keep our robot design simpler or make a modified KitBot only. If the students can show us good time management i’d reconsider adding another weeknight back, but I will not change my mind on meetings with meal breaks, cuz it means buying meals for kids who aren’t mine to feed. I don’t even have kids so why was I spending $100+ every Saturday to feed everyone else’s kids for them? I used my coach stipend but still, not what I wanted it to be used for.
