Ignored Students in FRC

FIRST General Forum
#18

I really like this piece of advice. When I was team captain in high school we literally had 75+ grade 9 students at the start of the year. Delegating was a lot of work and unfortunately we lacked the mentor pool to really get everyone involved. We’d try to have everyone on the team no matter their experience clean up. The grade 9’s we always paid the most attention to were the ones who were happy to join us. In fact I don’t think we had a single student who helped clean up not become fully involved and integrated into the team.

While obviously no one joins a FRC team just to clean, volunteering to do these things can show a lot of maturity and respect for the team as a whole.

Specifically to OP, your problem sounds like a team culture problem more than anything. Unfortunately team culture is one of the hardest things to change. I commemorate your ability to stick through it. Continue to stand up for yourself and try to use your role to change things for the better.

#19

Team culture (or rather, mentor-to-student relations), was primarily the reason why I left my team on a sour note. 5 years of losing because myself and the other students on my team were never given positions that had any real impact on the team’s performance. Only the mentors had true control.

(I could go in-depth about my personal FRC experience, but I’d probably end up writing a small novel)

#20

Hi Jon-

I’d be interested in seeing/hearing that full presentation. I hope you’d consider recording it the next time it’s presented.

#21

I’ll see if we can do that… we run that program in the fall though, so it would be a while until that happens! In the mean time, one of the drivers behind that presentation was a TED talk by Amy Cuddy about how your body language not only influences how others perceive you, but how it can influence your own self confidence and perceptions. Well worth the 20 minutes it takes to watch!

#22

It sounds like you have a team culture problem. My first piece of advice is this: identify the most senior mentor/coach/adult on your team who you don’t feel is a part of the problem, and arrange a meeting with them to discuss your concerns. Before you meet with them, make a list of 1. all of the problems in team culture that you’ve personally seen/want to change and 2. a possible solution (or multiple) to each problem. 2 is really important because even once you find an awesome adult who wants to help, they aren’t necessarily going to magically have all the answers. You coming to the table with some ideas to bounce off of them about how to make things better can help get the ball rolling.

Changing the culture of a team can be really hard, and it’s not a fast process. It probably won’t be super fun, but also remember that what you’re doing is not just about you (hopefully). Team culture problems rarely resolve themselves, especially when the same mentors/structure remain. If you do some of the heavy lifting to create a positive change, that positive change will stick around not only to make your experience better, but to make the experience of future team members better.

If you cannot find an adult willing to help (make sure you’ve looked really hard) or you are working on it but nothing seems to be changing, you might want to look and see if there’s any other teams in your area. I don’t generally recommend changing teams, because that doesn’t solve the root of the problem, it just kicks it down the road to a future team member. However, if there is another local team, and you feel a much better culture fit there, it may not be unwise to spend your senior year on that team IF your efforts to make change at your old team haven’t made much headway.

I wish you the best of luck.

#23

Personally, I think one of the best parts of FRC is that you need no experience.

My freshman year, I had never used a tool. That same year, I was on pit crew down at the field at Worlds. How did I get there? Listening to the team leads, and being willing to do a lot of menial tasks like hold wrenches, look for bolts, and assemble gearboxes without instructions (VEX…whyyyy…). I was always ready to do whatever was needed, even when it wasn’t super fun. And I learned a heck of a lot from it.

My sophomore year, I had no idea how to write code. But when the programming lead quit halfway through the year, I jumped in and volunteered. Now I’ve been the programming lead for 2.5 years and I’m about to go to college and hopefully study computer science.

I bring both of these up because I knew pretty much nothing when I started, but I was able to learn so much just by showing up, listening, and being willing to work. IMO, that matters more than having been taught CADD. Now, when I teach new members of the programming team, I’ve realized that it’s way easier to teach someone Java than it is to teach them how to listen, or how to be motivated, or how to be willing to do what seems menial but actually matters more than they realize.

No team member who wants to learn should ever be excluded based on past experience or lack thereof.

#24

For what it’s worth I’m sorry. I dunno what good that will do you. I sure as hell don’t think it would even begin to scratch the surface of the problems you are talking about. Of all things I want to say, all I would like to suggest there is one thing I would like you to hear based on what you said.

You aren’t rambling, your voice matters. Those who say otherwise aren’t worth the time.

#25

I’m really sorry that you feel this way about your team, and I wish you all the luck in bringing your team more together (hopefully)!

Truly, I have no malice towards my team. We’re still young and we are almost entirely student-run, we understand that it isn’t always going to be a perfect system. That being said, we had our own run-in with issues this year.

One of our problems was being left out, primarily on build team. We’ve got a large team with not enough jobs for everyone. Many times our sub-team leads would have freshmen vacuuming the floor, even if we haven’t used anything yet. They were obviously getting frustrated and it was easy to see why.

So there-on out we tried to become more organized (forming a day-to-day plan of who did what). We also tried our hand at cycling kids in and out: one day we would have upperclassmen working, the other day we would have underclassmen. For those who weren’t working we tried to come up with little projects: fixing our pit, planning out wall designs, etc. We want to make everyone feel included, as FRC is supposed to be one big happy family.

Outside of robotics, try to have a team dinner or something! We’ve had get together’s a few times, and it’s always been a lot of fun. In the end we are all one big team, and teams are supposed to have fun! On the other hand, there are some people that just prefer to be alone, and there’s no problem with that!

I hope you feel less left out next time. No one should have to be left alone, especially since FRC is supposed to bring us together. I’ve met many great people in my time on my team, and have formed great friendships. I hope the same happens for you, too.

#26

High school is a friggin’ battlefield. Building a program that works around and dodges the social problems that exist in every high school is a serious challenge, and one that I’m willing to bet every team struggles with to some extent.

Back when I was a student, I had a teammate who was truly an odd guy. He was smart and friendly, but spoke weirdly and didn’t know how to effectively communicate his ideas. He’d try to give us robot ideas in week 1 that we would discard out of hand, only to see those same ideas being used by teams like 330 or 1717. He wasn’t “in” the robotics “clique” despite showing up every day and working hard. He was one of the ignored students that you’re talking about, and I was part of the problem in ignoring him. Our (my) unkindness towards him hurt both our team’s performance and its culture. For years now, I’ve regretted how we treated him. I don’t know that if somebody had pulled 17-year-old me aside and told me to be nice and inclusive that I would have listened.

It’s hard to say if it was a problem with us specifically, or if we were just in high school and dealing with the associated social pressures. Are kids just kids, or were those fixable people issues?

It’s one of my goals as a mentor to help build an open, collaborative environment. When you notice a trend in team culture that you don’t like though, it’s hard to steer the whole ship back on course. I don’t see “team culture” discussed much here, and I’m glad to see this conversation happening. Do any of the more experienced mentors have advice on how to build a better learning environment, or books/resources on management that student leaders and mentors could benefit from?

#27

“You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to marshall again.”

Part of (and quite a large one) the reason for my success on my FRC team, and not being ignored, was due to my ability to advocate for myself. However, the reason I was able to do this was not due to my FRC experience, but rather having dealt with some rather difficult high school administrators for the two years prior to me stepping up to the plate on my team. It was really hard to do at first. You always feel like you’re offending someone and are going to get yourself cast out even further than you already are, especially when this other person is a student. In my experience, students have a harder time taking criticism than adults (there are certainly counterexamples, but that’s not the point). It takes a lot of work to overcome this.

What I learned from my past experience is that demonstration is the best advocacy. This can be quite hard if you’re already pushed to the side on an FRC team, but hear me out. Sometimes, the best way to prove you’re right is to show someone that you are, rather than telling them. For instance, when dealing with administration, I was told there was no room in any gym class, but I needed to have one each year to graduate high school. The answer to this was to go to each gym teacher myself and try and find an open spot that fit into my schedule. Once seeing this, the admins eventually let me slide. When dealing with some rather difficult students on an FRC team, sometimes just showing them that no, you don’t need to disassemble the entire robot just to access this one part will go a long way.

I’m not saying that one solution fits all. Far from it. I know some people who really wouldn’t appreciate being shown certain things, and especially not by someone else. But sometimes showing up at the right time with the right idea can make all the difference.

EDIT: I want to follow this up a bit and mention it is possible to over-advocate and come off as a bit of a jerk. I’ve certainly made this mistake too many times. It’s a hard balance to make, but try to balance showing that you’re right with demanding that you’re right.

#28

This is a hard problem and an ongoing challenge in our team, and I suspect that’s true in most teams unless they’re either very small or maybe classroom based. In some cases, what you put into it really does impact how much you get out of it. We have many students who show up only occasionally, and either come late or leave early because of dinner/homework/family obligations. That’s their prerogative, but it will impact how effective they can be on the team. On the other hand, we have kids who are there early every day, ask if they can help carry/set up/clean up, notice when someone is could use an extra pair of hands, etc. They get noticed, and get extra time with the mentors and student leaders. They have no trouble being heard. That’s probably not the OP’s situation, but it has to be said.

On the other hand, I don’t completely agree with either tryouts/cuts or with the POV of running a team like a business and focusing primarily on the most talented students. Unlike a business that uses employees to create a product, students are our product. I’d rather have an impact on a marginal student than increase the probability of my star students majoring in engineering from 99% to 99.5%. Because of that, we encourage students to join whenever they’re inspired to, and some of the holes on our robot are drilled by students who joined in week 6 of build season. Those holes are not always perfect, but that’s OK. As far as I’m concerned, that’s our mission.

Philosophy aside, there are some practical ways to impact the team culture around communication.

  1. Have several different modes of communication; some people communicate better face to face, in the moment. Others do better having some time to reflect and may prefer to communicate electronically. The LigerBots use Slack.
  2. Recruit a diverse group of mentors (harder for students to make happen, but parents and teachers can help convince the mentors to grow their group). Kids do better in a small group with adult mentors, and not every kid clicks with every adult.
  3. Use a variety of training styles and projects so everyone has a chance to learn, develop confidence, and build their reputation using a method that works for them. Some kids prefer lectures, others prefer a more hands-on approach.
  4. Try to have design reviews moderated by someone who doesn’t have a stake in the design decisions - maybe a business mentor with an engineering background, or an invited outside mentor or parent.
  5. The LigerBots use a design process that specifically aims to be inclusive. We break up the team into groups of 6-9 students with 2-3 mentors each. The groups are chosen with attention to experience, communication style, and other factors - for example, we try to put the quiet kids together so that they don’t get drowned out by the louder kids. We keep pairs of friends together for comfort but break up larger cliques, and so on. These groups meet on Sunday and Monday after kickoff to discuss game strategy and basic robot design, and then each group presents their ideas to the entire team. Finally, the build leaders (the most exprienced students) get together to synthesize a robot design from the ideas presented.

Good luck

#29

One thing I noticed both as a student and as a mentor is that communication between both parties is always difficult especially with the age gap and if your team has a low mentor-to-student ratio. Mentors might not understand the problems a high school student is going through and may even expect students to behave a certain way or do something a certain way without communicating it first. Mentors may be burdened by keeping track of 20+ students.

I think the points stated earlier about self-advocacy are extremely important for all students to understand, but it is also important for mentors to actively remind their students to reach out to them if they have issues and try to engage each student on a one-to-one basis as much as possible.

If this is a culture issue on your team, I would try to confide in a mentor you trust the most and discuss the concerns you are having. It also helps to reach out to other teams and see how they run their team by maybe taking a field trip to observe them in-person. Work to fix the issues step-by-step.

Since you are now in leadership, I would advise you to engage the rookie members and any other students you may feel are being excluded, so you can work to change their experience from your own experience. Talk with them on a one-to-one basis and ask how they would improve the team and make them feel like they are making a contribution by using their ideas.

Perhaps, later on, you can become a mentor and strive harder to make a change for the better!

#30

This thread is many parts discouraging and equals parts inspiring.

FRC 4607 has paved its way forward in our school based on the premise that all students have both access and opportunities to grow. We have forged ahead in our local area with the same premise - teams should have equal access and opportunities to grow - which is why we started JUMPSTART.

We start every LGM (Large Group Meeting) the same every Wednesday. We require all students and mentors to attend these meetings. Here are the intro slides for our LGM.

We use these slides to help ensure that all students understand what it is that makes 4607 what it is - a place where all can come and create their own way forward. We incessantly coach the kids about how we developed this team. The mentors did not sit down and come up with a gargantuan plan to become successful - instead we looked to the leaders of the school, the hallways where students were congregating, the lunchroom where kids openly converse and invited them all in. As the lead mentor, I do know that this effort - this approach - has never led us to build incredibly polished robots or compete at high levels. It has led to some interesting robots though.

This approach has also led us to grow in ways that I never would have imagined. Almost all of our outreach and initiatives have come from our student corps. The mentors on the team facilitate these students in their ideas. We know that the more invested that students are into our team, the better the team will survive into the next season and beyond.
This is not to say that all students’ ideas make a difference. Some ideas are inherently bad - either due to lack of understanding the problem fully or because they don’t understand the situation in full. However, students ideas are all heard. Some reach a more full action for the team at large. The ideas that do not flesh out are discarded. Either way, the student has had their time and an opportunity to express their ideas.

So this is why I am discouraged to hear that students are being ostracized on ANY team. If they are feeling that way, it is not just incumbent on them, it is up to the organization to address the situation and work through the problems.

I am also very inspired by those that have posted about how they solve these problems - or offering advice on how to be an advocate for themselves. However, it is best when this advice comes from someone that the student has a relationship with on the team - precisely a mentor.

Just my two cents.

#31

I don’t mean to be callous here, but I think this problem as it is specified in the OP is far too vague for anything coherent and actionable to be formulated to address it.

I have never seen a high school environment (or, really, any work environment, though high-school is particularly fraught for a number of reasons) which didn’t suffer from *some * sort of destructive social dynamic.

A general call to end all destructive social dynamics on teams is, of course, *totally *unobjectionable - but it is also unfortunately rather useless, much for the same reason that it’s so totally unobjectionable. If it were so easy as resolving to “stop leaving people out,” almost no teams would have this problem. Such a call is, in some sense, an “applause light.”](http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/)
Every team is different, and every team is going to have different problems. Be cautious of generalizing from your own experiences. That’s not to say that there aren’t common social dynamics that can be identified and addressed across teams - there are - but rather that even those require a much finer-grained approach than what is being put forward here. If you want to make a difference, you have to propose something that at least *some *people won’t agree with (in practice, at least, if not in principle).

#32

By providing OP with as many pieces of anecdotal evidence as possible, they can decide what solution is best for their team, no? They have more information than we do.

#33

I’ll chime in as a fairly inexperienced mentor (this is my third season). I’m just an adult and I work in an engineering role throughout the day. I’m not an educator and as such, I don’t know how students work. I have only ever raised a single human and I know how he operates about half of the time. My goal as a mentor is to touch lives. However, there’s a limit to how many lives I can touch when I’m on a team of 40 kids… The Team’s goal is to build a competitive robot and I like to think my job is to make sure that we turn cartoon physics into moderately functional real-world mechanics while ensuring that everyone learns something about the engineering process and how to use tools safely as well as learning a bit about what sorts of things are available in the real world. While doing all this, I like to understand who each team member is as a person… Every year it seems to take a couple of weeks before I develop a good mental map of who most everyone is, what some of their strengths are and what some of their weaknesses are… But there are always a few kids who don’t volunteer for anything, who like to sit on the sidelines and type on their phones, and when asked seem to get annoyed at the very prospect of doing anything that isn’t the coolest job on the team… When I ask for someone to volunteer to sort the box of drill bits or sort the box of miscellaneous bolts, or what have you; I add the volunteer to my mental list of “good people”… Then when the interesting jobs come up, I look around the room for someone on that list and offer it or ask them to do it… I award mental bonus points to any kid that comes up to me and says “Should I do this boring and banal thing that I think is actually pretty important?” … During competition last week, one boy who has a different role on the team was poking around the robot while the pit crew was watching matches and noticed something wrong… He turned to me and said “This bearing is coming out because it’s not retained by a shaft collar. Do you want me to fix that?” I wanted to run over and give him a giant hug but that would have been creepy so I said “Awesome! Go for it!” He won an all-star award in my head.

So the team currently seems to run as a bit of a meritocracy but I like to think we give students the opportunity to step up and shine… But like others have said, not every idea is a good one so if you suggest an idea and it isn’t taken, don’t feel excluded… When that happens, I try to explain why I think it won’t work but recognize also that as a mentor, everyone wants to talk to me at the same time and be heard and I try to listen to everyone’s ideas… So sometimes I’ll just choose the idea that seems most likely to be successful and we go with that… It’s ok. Keep offering ideas and listening to the others… Our team runs on ideas… No problem was ever solved by having a gaggle of kids playing video games.

I also like when kids come to me and say “I have this interpersonal problem; can you help?”

Anyway, this is my long way of saying “participate, don’t worry about being in the clique (if there is one), volunteer, observe, learn, clean, and have a good attitude”… If you have any sort of problem, talk to a mentor on the side…

#34

One thing I noticed both as a student and as a mentor is that communication between both parties is always difficult especially with the age gap and if your team has a low mentor-to-student ratio. Mentors might not understand the problems a high school student is going through and may even expect students to behave a certain way or do something a certain way without communicating it first. Mentors may be burdened by keeping track of 20+ students.

I think the points stated earlier about self-advocacy are extremely important for all students to understand, but it is also important for mentors to actively remind their students to reach out to them if they have issues and try to engage each student on a one-to-one basis as much as possible.

If this is a culture issue on your team, I would try to confide in a mentor you trust the most and discuss the concerns you are having. It also helps to reach out to other teams and see how they run their team by maybe taking a field trip to observe them in-person. Work to fix the issues step-by-step.

Since you are now in leadership, I would advise you to engage the rookie members and any other students you may feel are being excluded, so you can work to change their experience from your own experience. Talk with them on a one-to-one basis and ask how they would improve the team and make them feel like they are making a contribution by using their ideas.

Perhaps, later on, you can become a mentor and strive harder to make a change for the better!

#35

I have had a similar issue before but not exactly the same. When I was a junior in highschool I was being bullied and harassed by a mentor on the team, even though I was in a leadership position it was happening because I was a female.

I mentioned it a few times to our teacher with nothing done. I started documenting every instance and how this was unacceptable. Presented it in written form as well as having a conversation. When presented with the evidence in this clear concise format the teacher really did not have a choice but to address the issue that was right in front of him. I suggest documenting everything, and if you do decide to approach a mentor or teacher having both clear concise examples and documented all examples. This will help it stay away from a he said she said. If you have any other questions please feel free to message me. I wish you good luck.

#36

Sure, but we could be a lot more efficacious in our aid if the OP would share some more team-specific information than they did (and other people reading the thread would be more-likely to be able to take something away if a solution seems appropriate for the described context). A plain collection of anecdotes is of dubious utility, I think.

#37

Thank you for posting OP! It takes courage to bring up and discuss such topics. As you’ve already indicated, it really is a struggle to get through some of these inter-personal issues.

Two thoughts come to mind for me.

As a mentor, I must ask my students for patience and help. I am not qualified to deal with these sorts of interpersonal issues. I am not trained as a teacher, or a counselor. I am not telepathic either. My college degree says I know how to trick rocks into doing math. A neat trick for sure, but basically useless when it comes to resolving people issues. Any time I deal with these sorts of things, I really am flying by the seat of my pants.

Self advocacy is definitely useful. I know we don’t give every student or idea a fair share of time or consideration on our team. We simply don’t have enough manpower to do so. Still, I don’t like telling people to “suck it up” in this case - no one shoudl ever feel purposefully left out of the conversation.

Perhaps more of an aside but still… One thing that stood out to me from OP.

For anyone reading this, what is your answer to the question of “Who are you?”? Answering this should be a non-trivial exercise.

Here’s one example:
Are you the goofball of your group? That’s wonderful! I love goofy people! Case in point: I wear a red chef hat to every robotics competition I go to!

But. Does your goofiness add to your team’s mission, or detract from it? Do your behaviors make people more productive, or less? Also, do you know yourself well enough to honestly answer that question?

If you’re in the “detract” bucket, I do recommend looking to change behavior! Talk with your mentors, and work hard at knowing yourself so that you may better yourself.
Understand too that the barriers to changing behavior are often rooted VERY deeply inside of you - change is rarely easy.

This got more philosophical than I wished perhaps. Some days I forget this is a robotics forum :).