I am a volunteer mentor (with a limited role) and a parent of a kid who is very involved in his school’s FRC team. He started as a team member, took a leadership position the following year, and is now the president of the 80 person team that includes FRC and several FTC teams.
My question is a bit more from a parent perspective. While my child loves robotics and spends tons of time on it. I’ve noticed that it is taking far too much time - a rather unhealthy amount for a HS teenager. During build season, it’s pretty common that he goes to bed at 2AM in the. morning. Right now as the president, even during off season, he is putting in anywhere from 15~25 hours a week already. As an example, this week alone, between Monday through Wednesday, he has already put in 14 hours, and the week is only half way through. His mentor has just asked him to take on another huge chunk of responsibilities because a lead on the team isn’t doing their job. He feels uncomfortable pushing back because 1) this seems to be the culture in robotics, 2) “the buck stops with him” because he is the president, 3) the mentor is an adult after all.
As a parent, this seems excessive. It is having an adverse impact on his academics. I am curious from others:
What are the hours expectations for the students on your team? Is this normal?
How are your student leaders expected to handle performance issues among fellow students? In HS, it’s not uncommon for poor-performing students to be “team carried” by the stronger student. But in such a large organization with this level of time commitment, that simply doesn’t seem reasonable.
I hold multiple different positions on my team and put in probably around 16 hours a week into robotics during build season until Saturday and late night meetings get involved, then the math gets funky and can easily go upwards of 25 hours. During the off-season, I only put in about 3-5 hours weekly.
On 816 we recommend our members to attend our weekly off-season meetings as there is only one every week until kickoff. This equates to roughly 2.5-3 hours of time. During build season we expect members to attend meetings at least 3 out of the 5 days of the week. This equates to a minimum of around 7.5-9 hours weekly. I cannot speak for any team but my own but anyone putting more than around 20 hours weekly is excessive and could negatively impact them.
On 816 we have a kind of sink-or-swim mentality on the individual level. Our leads for our different sub-teams are responsible for their group of students and do their best to try and manage them. When students begin to slack off they are given warnings and then are seriously talked to by our Captain and/or Vice Captain and/or Mentors. From that talk, further action is decided primarily by the mentors.
I would like to quote someone from a different thread that had really good insight into where robotics should be on student’s priority list.
This is something that I could not agree with more and if this negatively impacts anything from the aforementioned priorities, you may want to have a discussion with your child about what you see and your concerns.
Again I am not a parent but a student and I hope you are able to work this out with your child and figure out the best course of action.
Something to keep in mind, as a parent, is that the mentors on teams are not infallible. Most of us are not trained educators. I know for a fact that I’ve asked too much of students in the past, and I almost certainly will again. The thing I appreciate the most from our students is when they’re comfortable enough to say “hey, that’s too much work” or “hey, that date is homecoming, we shouldn’t have a meeting”.
I don’t know you, your student, or the mentor in question, but it is very likely the mentor isn’t intentionally overloading your student, and would appreciate feedback.
Edit: On theme, I neglected to directly answer your questions.
We meet from the second week of school through the end of the school year - no real summer obligations exist. We meet MWF every week, 2-2.5 hours per day. During build season, these extend a little bit, plus the addition of Saturday meetings. We ask that everyone attends 80% of meetings - this means that you can skip a meeting before a big test, and it won’t be a big deal.
This changes wildly based on the situation. In some cases, students can identify issues and will directly approach other students to offer assistance or try to understand what roadblocks are preventing progress. Other times, they don’t know how to address the situation, and they come to the mentors to ask for help. More often, mentors feel like the team has, or will, miss a deadline, and we try to tell the relevant student lead that we’re worried about the planned timeline or disappointed that something was missed. Our team is approximately 110ish members this year, and we have a ton of stuff going on during any given meeting, so there’s always some deadline being missed - and that’s fine. Both for me as a mentor, and for our student leadership team, part of the process is learning to manage people, and we all get a little bit better, every day, together.
Not a parent, but I’m also the president of our team.
Our team is decently sized (~30) on paper, but the bulk of the work ends up being done by a few kids (~6-10 over the past few years), so our hours get a bit insane (I logged over 650 hours last build/competition season, so often 60+ hour weeks). We had tons of meetings that ran until after 3 am (we had 2 straight weeks of 3 am meetings leading up to our second competition), and the meeting right before our first comp went until 6 am. No one is expected to pull these hours, but several of us (mainly people in leadership) do.
We definitely do put in more work when we feel there is still stuff to do. For example, last year, we happened to have a weaker build team and build leadership, so the other president and I ended up taking on additional build responsibilities (in addition to responsibilities as head of code, head of fundraising, and treasurer). There was no expectation that we take on the extra work, but she and I both really wanted the team to do well, so we decided to spend the extra time to get a better robot.
We aren’t a ‘high functioning’ team. We meet about 4 hours a week in the off season, and 13 hours a week in season. Students aren’t expected to attend every meeting unless they need to be there. If build needs to be there, we want build there. This isn’t alot of time compared to better teams. We don’t stay until we want, the mentors schedule our end time and we end there. There are no 3am meetings.
We function on effort. If you want to be the lead of your division, you must work for it. We don’t assign titles to folks; they are handed out based on if they pushed themselves into it. The only formal title is the Captain and Co-Captain, which is election based + mentor approval. Some kids are just less dedicated than others, and they naturally float into a lighter position where they show up less and aren’t under stress.
We schedule around 25 - 30 hours a week of practice. We Split each practice into 2 shifts (2 - 3 hours) going to those practices isn’t required, if you go to one shift you dont have to stay through the other but were not going to stop you from going to every shift in every practice. so a student can put in anywhere from 3 hours to 30 hours a week all dependent of how much time they want to put in.
Our most dedicated students will be at 3 weeknight practices and then Saturday during build season. That usually totals around 24 hours a week, but can be a little more if we get behind during build season. Something is wrong with our season if we are at school after 10PM. Plus, I am getting too old to handle that. We try to be done by 7 or 8 weeknights. School is important. We run 1 practice a week during off-season.
From a parent’s perspective, culture is a very obvious thing to make a broad assumption about. Here I think your statement isn’t 100% correct. As a student involved in FRC, you start to see that this huge time commitment is not an entire program thing, but a thing that varies on a team-by-team basis. In my area, I am familiar with teams that put in about the same amount of time your child does. There are also teams in my area that meet ~3hrs per week.
“the buck stops with him” because he is the president
As a student who is on my teams Student Leadership Team this is kinda true. Each team is diffrent so I cannot comment on the validity of the statement. I will say though that Student leaders are examples for the rest of the team. They set the status quo for what students should act like. The most powerful change that a team can have comes from student leaders.
the mentor is an adult after all
Yes the mentor is and adult but that does not mean that they have all the power. Good mentors listen to the students. If the student needs some help with a project, the mentor faccilitates help; Student or adult help is on a situation basis. Student wants to take on more responsibilities, the mentor should accomodate. If a student needs to scale back responsibilities because it is starting to have an adverse effect, they need to faccilitate that. It is also important to note that a student advocating for themselves should never be looked down upon, shamed, or punished for taking care of themselves.
What are the hours expectations for the students on your team? Is this normal?
On my team during the offseason (April - December) we meet about 3hrs per week. Some weeks we dont meet because of different circumstances. But most weeks its 3hrs. There is a chance for students to do some more optional time with outreach events or extra things the students want to take on. Like last week my team participated in the West Coast Products Cadathon, where we model a 3d robot in about a week. This was an entirly optional thing to participate in/. On my 20 person team there were about 4-5 of us.
During our build season (January - April) our schudaled meetings are ~21 hrs a week. Some students optionally put in more, and some less because (just an example) they have football every tuesday or family is in town and they are going to dinner.
We ask that students try to show up at least 50% of the time, this keeps them in the loop and allows them to work on projects that take a bit more time than one meeting.
How are your student leaders expected to handle performance issues among fellow students? In HS, it’s not uncommon for poor-performing students to be “team carried” by the stronger student. But in such a large organization with this level of time commitment, that simply doesn’t seem reasonable
As a student leader I am going to answer this as if it were my team. A team is only as strong as its weakest link. You have your students that can be given a task and can run with it. They make it work and they do it well. There are also those students that need a bit more support. As a leader my first priority is to support my team members. If a student needs assitance or does not understand somthing, my priority is to help them out. If that means stepping away from a project im working on to do so I will. Mentors and student leader first priority should be support. If support is not prioritzed that leads to a bad learning expericnce.
In FRC we use Robots to build students. It is very easy to lose sight of that and use Sudents to build Robots. First and foremost this program is about learning. If learning is not happening or is being adversly affected, things need to change.
I will cotinue to say this. Robotics is a fourth place activity.
Health (both mental and physical)
Personal responsibilities (family dutys, relationships, etc.)
Academics
Robotics
If a student is starting to stuggle with any of the items above robotics, somthing needs to change. That may be scaling back time at robotics. It may be academic support. It may be professial help. Whatever it needs to be is very dependent on the situation and student.
If you would like a more in depth look at how my team functions I have attached our team hand book.
Every year I post this, every year it rings true. Most teams meet way to often. This student is definitely putting in too many hours and mentors need to step in and take some responsibility off their plate.
Our plan this year during build season is to meet 6:30pm-8:30pm Tuesday and Thursday, 11-5 on Saturdays and 12-5 on Sundays. This is 15 hours a week. Leadership is expected to attend 75% of these meeting times as well as log an average of 1 hour of at home/online work per week. Non leadership is expected to attend 30% of meetings and their time can be offset by attending online work or doing work from home.
This translates to about 12.5 hours per week for leadership and 5 hours per week for non leadership. Or 63 hours over build season for leadership and 30 for non leadership. These hours have actually helped us be pretty successful . I encourage any team who is consistently meeting 25+ hours a week to seriously look at how effective their time is being used
Parent, turning back in to a part time mentor as well.
Anything over 15 hours during the offseason is pushing hard. Theres another semester when they want to push their limits already. And as for some other team leader not getting it done, on a team that big, that’s when its time to delegate. And a mentor needs to be teaching that. You could have a business student running the project management portion of the build on a team that size and be fine. Because they dont have to touch the bot. Off season, whats so important to add to the same kids plate, rather than offer it to another kid to put their stamp on the team? Theres no reason to ask any one single kid to commit that much.
My child loves to over-commit, and makes it work. Insane hours, work load and a complicated home life. And a relationship now on top of everything else.
Check in with your kiddo regularly. Some of them thrive in these spots, and can take their experiences in to the workforce and show out because deadlines and multiple projects dont phase them. Others burn out and wont slow down till they do and we have to be ready to help them rest and get back in to a good swing of things.
On 8033, we’re finally setting attendance expectations this year, which has helped balance out the time commitment across members (although it is still pretty unbalanced, that’s just the nature of FIRST to be honest). Those expectations are as follows:
Offseason, 2 meetings are expected, one all-team and one subteam-specific. The total expected lab time is ~7-10 hours per week, and we enforce that across a 50 person team.
Onseason, 3 meetings a week as expected (two subteam specific). Time expectation is closer to 10-15 hours a week.
As a student who’s always gone a little above what’s reasonable, I probably averaged somewhere in the 30-50 hour-a-week range during build season in 2022, 23, and 24.
The reality is that in most cases when students put in that much time, it’s because they love doing it, and there’s a good chance they’re connected to the wider FIRST community too, which can become a real social draw. And though it tends not to be the most strategic decision in terms of college admissions, the engineering and leadership skills that can be learned with that level of commitment really can’t be understated. Students who put in that kind of time on teams that have the opportunities to serve them learn incredibly quickly, and those skills are difficult to learn through academics or other extracurriculars. Additionally, that kind of time commitment will boost the student’s chance of winning Dean’s List if they’re nominated.
Ultimately though, what matters is whether the team is reciprocating that commitment. See if they have well-defined goals and see if those goals align with what your son really wants. See if they have mentors who really care about doing things that are new. If they line up, then I say let your son put in the time they want, provided that they make responsible choices. You might be amazed by what can come out of it.
However, if the team doesn’t have well-defined goals or if those goals don’t line up with your son’s, everything kind of changes. They may find that it becomes very frustrating to put in so much time without seeing the results on the field or in the lab. The reality is that you can’t win in FRC with just one driven / talented student. That can be hard to accept for students who really want to see their team compete, and it can lead to some pretty dark places. So definitely keep that in mind.
I don’t have answers, but what I can say is that this is a real issue, and one that I’ve faced as well.
Having been the student leader on Media/Marketing, Awards, and Strategy (de facto subteam captain for each) last year, I experienced what can happen when you force yourself past your limits. Maybe it was influenced by stress, maybe it was just coincidental, but directly after Worlds this April, I got sick and had to miss 2 additional weeks of school. This was devastating academically, and took the remainder of the school year to try to catch up on. Even just running an Impact Award subteam and presenting at 2 district events was almost too much.
But having just been elected as Co- Team Captain, I’m worried about if I will be able to live up to this responsibility. I anticipate putting in the same ridiculous hours as last year if not more. This is something that I have accepted, even though I know the outcome.
I can’t blame this on team culture. We have had many students during my time that have been able to find a healthy balance and made it work. At the same time, blaming personal responsibility can be a dark road of self-blame that is not healthy either.
This program has been one of the most incredible, transformative experiences of my life. At the same time, I have come seriously close to outright quitting at least 7 or 8 times in now my 5 years in FTC and FRC. Both are true. That combination confuses me.
So, this has been admittedly sort of rambling, but to summarize my point shortly, these challenges are legitimate, your child is not alone in experiencing them, and there are ways to resolve the issue. (Although I am unsure of them)
I really appreciate all the quick responses. It’s quite eye-opening the variability across the teams!
Yes, he does love robotics and is fully committed to his team’s success. He is also friends with many of the student leads, and wants to ensure their success.
As a manager in a tech firm myself, I truly appreciate the incredible opportunity he has to develop not only the hard skills, but also the soft skills. Looking back, I wish I have similar opportunities to develop these soft skills when I was younger.
That said, I agree with others that robotics should be after health and academics. He also goes to a semi-competitive HS with higher-than-average academic pressure. Hence my serious concerns about time commitment.
One thing I did notice about the off-season is that, besides training, his team puts significant emphasis on community impact and outreach events. While these are good things to do in general, they are taking the bulk of the time. To make matters worse, some of these events are during school hours. For example they have community impact events that would basically require students on the team to miss class once a month. Through my parent’s eyes, that seems inappropriate. Also, I feel that a robotics team should be centered on the robot. These outreach activities, while good to do and important for certain awards, should take a distant second in terms of time and resource to the robot.
Am I mistaken in my understanding of CI/Event’s importance in the FRC world? I am curious how much time that takes in other teams? Do other teams have limits or guidelines for what types of events/CI activities to tackle?
in off season we schedule each subteams practices on different days because were mainly just training new kids so if theres a kid that wants to learn more than one subteam we dont have any scheduling conflicts, then we’ll have an all team practice at the end of the week
Then we have drive practice on saturdays for any off season comps
From my experience in frc (4 years on the team about 2 years ago) what consitutes a healthy amount of time working in the team is a complicated subject and incredibly individualistic.
I myself have put in at least 10 hours every single day during the build season and i am confident in saying it was absolutely worth it. I also know people that put in much less time than me and still it was too much for them. To make things even harder I have friends that constantly complained about needing to work more than they wanted that benefited immensely from that.
I wouldnt assume just because your child spends a lot of time on frc that it is unhealthy for him, but perhaps keeping track to make sure that it is also still beneficial instead of harmful is a good idea.
There is no normal. What is a healthy amount of time on one team can be way too much on another team. If students are staying on top of their health, school, etc. and they want to be doing robotics, then they are probably spending a reasonable amount of time. On some teams, meeting time is just for focused robot building, for other teams doing homework and hanging out with friends are normal buildspace activities.
Some of the years our team has had the fewest problems with burnout and academics leadership have met 30+ hours per week. Other years we’ve struggled to maintain a good team culture and had serious burnout problems at 20 hours a week.
You’re not the first one to make that mistake, you won’t be the last. It’s (un)surprisingly common. There’s a LOT of history to unpack, but I’ll try to be brief and then you can ask questions after reading.
The first thing to note: FIRST’s name. For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. The name is the purpose; the name is the mission. (Obviously it’s a little more nuanced than that.) FIRST is not just FRC (or FTC or FLL or FIRST Global). FIRST is about Inspiring the next generation of engineers and scientists–the people who will solve some of the toughest problems out there.
In other words: This isn’t about the competition, at all (yet). It usually takes a couple of years for people to figure that out; some only figure it out after they’ve left it.
But if this isn’t about the competition… Why do we HAVE a competition? That’s actually a lot simpler. If you’re going to inspire someone, it definitely helps to get them involved in something. And for some reason, humans, especially teenage humans, like to compete. If you want to get people inspired and involved, a competition works pretty well–and hey, you learn stuff along the way, so that’s an extra win. Because this is engineering, you need an engineering challenge/competition–enter FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) back in 1992. (There’s another story there about the sources of FRC. Another time.)
So, you now have a competition, which is functioning like bait on a hook. As teachers, you bring in industry mentors (ideally) to work with the students and teach them a few things–and exact mix is left up to the teams. [insert decades-old argument here] This tends to get the kids hooked (not necessarily on engineering, mind you). But, there’s two things that you still need: more exposure, and incentive to help others.
Enter two things: Gracious Professionalism (being gracious while still professionally competing is one way to describe it; there’s a few others, and I’ll leave it to others to bring up some of the Woodie Flowers videos that describe it better), and the Impact Award (at the time, the Chairman’s Award). The former is the incentive to help others; the latter focuses on exposure and actually partnerships within the community (not just on the team). By the way… You say the outreach activities are “important for certain awards”… The Impact Award is only the HIGHEST AWARD IN FRC. No other award is regarded as highly. No other award is as important, and that includes World Champion.
Here is the short description of the Impact Award, emphasis mine and taken from Resource Library | FIRST
Description
The FIRST Impact Award (formerly the Chairman’s Award) is the most prestigious award at FIRST, it honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the mission of FIRST. It was created to keep the central focus of FIRST Robotics Competition on the ultimate goal of transforming the culture in ways that will inspire greater levels of respect and honor for science and technology, as well as encouraging more of today’s youth to become science and technology leaders.
Overview
The concept of the FIRST Impact Award enables FIRST to recognize teams for their exemplary efforts in spreading the FIRST message. Teams must submit for this award by the deadline to be eligible for the award. After submitting, teams will receive an email to confirm the submission has been accepted and it will also list the events the team is eligible to be judged at. The teams who have earned the Regional and District Championship FIRST Impact Award can travel to the FIRST Championship to be considered for the FIRST Impact Award.
The problem is that during competition season, there’s no time for much outreach. There’s a robot to build. During those 6-12 weeks (depending on when you compete), most teams do minimal outreach, except to assist other teams. That leaves the offseason to demonstrate the robot, run FLL/FTC/[other robot competition teams], do summer camps, raise funds, recruit and train new members, and quite possibly compete in a few competitions. Oddly enough, most of those activities take quite a bit of planning and some execution time.
So, to sum up a bit: The outreach is actually one of the primary reasons FIRST exists in the first place. It’s not just for the awards (it’s been noted that teams that do the outreach to do the outreach actually often do at least as well when it comes to getting Impact as those teams that do it specifically for Impact).
Now, on to your concerns about time spent, and leadership:
It sounds like there are a couple of soft skills that he needs to learn. Call it three for good measure, and as an industry mentor/alumni I’ll admit that I don’t have the hang of all of them. And no, time management isn’t one of them–this time.
When and how to say no–being fully committed to team success doesn’t mean that he takes on everything. He will need to learn, at some point, how to say “I can’t do that, and I’m not sure the team is able to, until X Y Z”.
Delegation–He is the president. That doesn’t mean he has to do everything. It should be OK for him to pass tasks on to others.
Failure and handling thereof–If someone doesn’t do their job, it’s OK to not always rescue them. It’s OK to let someone fail–but it’s also OK to arrange for more support (that isn’t you, see above) or even to (and this is only if needed) replace them to get the job done. (Also teach that person about delegation. But that’s another thing entirely.)
It sounds like he may be about to learn some of these the hard way. As his parent, and a tech manager, you may want to sit him down and talk to him from your experience on those, maybe see if he’ll take some advice. If he doesn’t take it now… he may take it in a year or two.
The late nights… Yeah, that’s problematic. It may be worth a discussion with the mentors about “hey, can someone set a hard close at something reasonable, and hold it at that?”
My team’s shop is open every day from after school until 9 or 10 at night (we prefer 9, but can crunch to 10 only if necessary–10 is the “hard out” that everyone leaves by), and weekends all day Saturday and Sunday afternoons, during build. This time of year we’re open a couple of days a week (Saturdays particularly) and during lunch periods on occasion. You’d think that’s a lot of time spent there–but there’s one thing we tell the kids, and that is “This is not your whole life. Get schoolwork done. Get sleep. If you’re in here all the time we’re open for a week, you WILL be kicked out of the shop for the day!” Each day is optional for everybody, which helps keep everybody sane and caught up on schoolwork. (If you’re WFH on the robot? Well, at least you aren’t in the shop.)
I share your skepticism of robotics teams asking students to put a lot of time into non-robotics community outreach. I’m a mentor not a parent, so my perspective might be different but, I don’t think it makes as much sense try to find how much time is the right amount for robotics, or how many missed classes is too much. Is your student maintaining their grades and health, and excited to spend time at robotics? If yes, then the time commitment is probably fine. If not, then figure out how to cut down until life balances out again.