Looking for some brutally honest feedback...

FIRST General Forum
1

First off, i know that anonymous accounts are frowned upon, so apologies for that, but I am looking to get some brutally honest feedback without my team knowing who this necessarily is. Anyways… I wrote a rant about some of the most recent pitfalls of our team, and was advised not to post it. But, I still have a few questions for the FRC community.

Long-rant short, our team probably will not exist next year, for a couple reasons:

  1. Our team as a whole does not have its heart in the activity.
  2. Our mentors - Don’t get me wrong, they are truly awesome people, but they either don’t really have their heart in it, or they are doing the work that the students should be doing.
  3. Our students - Yet again, we have some truly intelligent and hardworking students, but they lack the commitment that is showing up on time
    , learning and doing some of the more ‘boring’ stuff, and taking initiative. One of our “captains” taught themselves over the summer all the ins and the outs of the robot, and thus they are REALLY good at making the robot be awesome.

It really upsets me that we are even thinking about the possibility of the team not existing next year. I truly want the team to thrive, and hopefully come back and work with the team.

Anyways, I have a couple of questions for the CD community:

  1. Do you have seniors who do a lot of the work on the team?
  2. Do your mentors do a large chunk of the robot work?
  3. How involved are the majority of students on your team? Do they do a lot of the work, or do mentors?
  4. Do your students learn more by themselves or more from other students and mentors?

If you would prefer to reply in a more “anonymous” fashion, feel free at: https://goo.gl/forms/ksZbCXXo1NEj6Cbh1

Thank you for your honest feedback.

2

I am setting a timer to see how long this takes to turn into a “mentors do too much work” thread. Hopefully it doesn’t go in that direction.

Do you have seniors who do a lot of the work on the team?
Yes. And so do freshman, sophmores, and junior students.

Do your mentors do a large chunk of the robot work?
Yes. And so do the students. And so do our suppliers, and so do parents.

How involved are the majority of students on your team? Do they do a lot of the work, or do mentors?
As involved as they want to be.

Do your students learn more by themselves or more from other students and mentors?
Yes. They do. Depending on how motivated they are and how involved they want to be.

The long and the short of this is, running a successful FRC team takes so much work that NO team has enough hands to do it all. With our 40+ members and 15+ mentors this year, we still wish for more help all the time. Regardless of how many mentors and how many students work on the robot, it is never done early enough. We are still working on it through Champs, and sometimes through IRI.

I somewhat get the impression that you are using your own level of commitment as an expectation for your fellow students and mentors. That doesn’t work in practice because everyone is different.

Why would your team cease to exist? I struggle to put my finger on a reason from your initial post. In addition, I think you need to re-evaluate your questions. Generally speaking if you’re doing research you want to stay away from leading questions.

3

My team is relatively small (~20 students), quite young (7 students returning with 1 year frc experience), and unstable in funding and student experience.

From my experience, teams will have ups and downs depending mostly on the competence of students and the amount of them.

This is okay, but obviously not ideal, if you stay down for too long you will loose support from your school, sponsors, and community.

To answer your questions:
-The seniors and mentors doing the majority of the work depends on the year.
-Some students attend every meeting and others don’t, they have commitments and the most involved students put in extra hours to make sure we finish on time.
-Student learning depends on the student. Some people learn really well by prototyping on their own and others need more guidance. Don’t give your students the answer but give them a push in the right direction when they need it.

Here’s my suggestion: Do what you need to do to finish the build season on time. Give the students choices to guide them in the right direction but let them choose what they will enjoy the most. Keep the students that you have now.

Don’t give up on this season for recruiting new students. Demo your robot(s) around your school or community to generate interest. Don’t be afraid to take some new students to the competition so they can see what FRC is all about.

Attend offseason events and bring new members. Continue meeting in the offseason and find fun and interesting projects to build skills and community.

Good Luck!

4

+1 I will have to agree with Tom. I’ve been on both sides of the spectrum from the lowest point to the highest, both as a student and mentor. I’ve seen what hard work and dedication from both sides gets you to. I think instead of asking those questions you should be brainstorming ways of approaching both students, mentors, teachers, etc; whomever you have to on ways to fix the problem. Sit down with a group of your peers at a time asking why they are there, what they want to do. Engage them and try to find teachers within the school district who want to be there. That is all I have. Best of luck and hate to see a team thinking about disbanding over something trivial. Feel free to pm me maybe my team is nearby to yours and can help.

5

Keeping students as engaged and committed as the FIRST season demands is major problem for the majority of teams. There’s no shame in admitting that. I’ll admit my team is plagued by this problem too.

In my opinion, what keeps a team together is the complex social-structure that good teams develop. This is the “team” in “team-building.” Ultimately, student push themselves to achieve, less because of the learning and experience benefit to themselves, and more because of the social gratification they will receive. If there is not a strong system of social rewards for ambition and commitment, that could be the key to success.

At it’s core, our team is really just a few inter-locking friend circles that have been built around robotics. There are many ways of creating this social foundation, but a simple way is to put your team through duress and make them find a way out. If only a few people do not give up it will be a good team-building exercise. I caution against internet team-building activities – they’re ineffective and a waste of everyone’s time.

6

I disagree. Team building activities help to create friendships where there may have been none before, and team members who would normally never associate with each other because of their cliques or social status can find similar ground in problem solving. It helps to eliminate the imaginary “grade” boundary between 9/10/11/12 that so many students have ingrained. It also includes mentor-mentor bonding, and student-mentor bonding.

A well designed team building activity, game night, or other fun activity can solidify a team.

7

Our team is a REALLY small team. The requirements to be on the team are more demanding than an average high school, considering it is run through a vocational school that is combined by the three small high schools in our county. Since you have to attend the vocational school in our CAD, Engineering, or Precision Machining classes to be on the team, it is hard for some students to be on there. Especially when most students can’t take a vocational class here until they are at least a sophomore, usually a junior. We only have around 10 students (MAYBE) with 5 mentors (One being an FRC alumni that competed in 2015 and 2016 that is now in college helping out.)

  1. We actually only have one senior on our team this year, and he helps when he can. Our team has 2 freshman, 3 sophomores, 4 juniors (2 returning), and the single senior (returning). He is very interested in the robot and how it works, but he usually stays to himself.

  2. The mentors on our team usually only do things that the students don’t know how to do yet and teach the students along the way so they don’t have to ask again. They do it for themselves after they learn.

  3. Refer to 1 and 2. Our students are involved until they don’t know how to do something.

  4. I rarely have seen a student learn by themselves unless it was through research they have done. Our college mentor was one of the only kids that came through our program that ALMOST learned how to program by himself, and it was through LabView. He did a lot of trial and error, and in turn is trying to teach the current students how to code the 2017 robot now.

I will say that our group lacks drive and determination that some other teams do. But only because we rarely see funding to get to District Champs. Our students love what they are doing, but fail to see the bigger picture sometimes.

8

I completely agree with this! We mostly use the nights before competition at the hotel to hang out and bond. we swim, play board games, watch movies, and just hang. Some of these moments are the happiest times of my life. I suggest waiting for the competition to get the students hooked on the feeling. Honestly, I wasn’t that into robotics until our first regional, and then I fell in love. Hopefully the same will happen to your team!

9

Honestly, this is something I struggle with. On one hand, I have a handful of students that put in effort. More effort than they should really. This is also an inordinately expensive program. So weighing those two facts against the 80% of the team that does nothing leaves me with two choices. Waste a ton of money and show those students that work that their work is meaningless OR push and end up doing more work.

Ultimately, I guess it’s up to the mentor but I feel like I have a responsibility to ensure the success of the team. I honestly don’t care if I have more medals and banners, and I’ve had seasons where I think I scored 1 point all season across 2 events. But to me, if I’ve got a single student putting in effort I’m going to be there next to them doing anything. I can to make sure it’s as successful as I can me.

You want some brutally honest feedback - There’s no right answer, If you, as a student don’t want the mentors stepping up show them you guys can. I don’t know what your question really is but ultimately I’ll tell you what I told my students earlier this season - We’re all there because we want to show you guys that STEM is cool, I can (and do) build a lot of stuff in my spare time and I do it a lot cheaper and a lot faster than I can with a bunch of high school students. I CAN do this on my own. If you want to learn, ask and we’ll teach you. You’re gonna get out what you put into this program.

10

No team is perfect, but it seems to me that you are not happy with the current direction and want to see your team grow.

My suggestions are to meet individually with the mentors and learn what motivates them. Then do the same with the team leadership and a random assortment of the rest of the team, making sure to include students from age (or grade).

My guess is that you will find mentors excited by the technical challenge, being respected and listened to as well as being part of a successful team. For the students its a chance to learn and grow, try out their ideas, enjoy socializing with people interested in robotics and physical nature of building something.

Having a stake in the outcome is another strong motivator. No one likes to be told, just do this without understanding the why.

Who does what in my mind is not important, so long as everyone gets a chance to influence the design. And yes in the rush to get something built, students that show up infrequently or late may not get to see the big picture. If you want that, then one has to be committed and willing to put in the time.

As a mentor, I feel my responsibilities are:

  1. Safety (use protective gear, use the tools correctly, no playing with the tools or materials)
  2. Protect the school, room and tools and without wasting material.
    This included bumpers on the robot so the walls don’t get damaged.
    Using a vice or scrap lumber so holes are not drilled into tables.
    Drill at the correct speed to avoid dulling bits.
    Laying out a design on a side vs in the center of a board, to minimize scrap.
  3. Teach. Proper tool use, design, strategy, the need to think thru a design instead of just cutting and building.
  4. Have fun

I work best when students show up on time to meetings, share their ideas, willing to draw up their ideas and then discuss ways of building. Students that show up late, for a small part of the build meeting, spend most of their time socializing, manage to leave before its time to clean up, tend to disrupt the work flow and result in more mentor effort.

Like a sports team, the competition starts with team preparation. First learn how to draw and build. Buy parts early. Do some practice design and build activities. If your students can do that in the fall, I think your team will enjoy the competition more and the mentors go into cruse mode.

Every team is different, but FIRST is about students working with engineers.
How you draw the line of who does what is based on your coach and how they want to run the team. If you can get the team trained up in the fall and implement rational design decisions where everyone can contribute, its shouldn’t matter as much who does what, since there is plenty to do during a build.

To your question, “Do your students learn more by themselves or more from other students and mentors?”
I have found that when teaching specific skills like filling or hack sawing, one student who thinks they are doing it right will pass on their bad habits. Its like the communication train. I tell one student something, they pass it on to the next student and before long the message has changed. So if you want to share a specific skill, a highly skilled mentor is the way to go.
But students will pay more attention to their peers and end up being more interested in that task. So the answer is it depends on the task and how skilled is the student.

Dave
Build Mentor

11

>Do you have seniors who do a lot of the work on the team?

Yes, seniors make up the bulk of the knowledge and work on our team. This isn’t necessarily seniors, it’s just that the class of 2017 was extraordinarily large and talented. Our Freshmen-Juniors are competent enough to survive without the senior class, however. One of the greatest responsibilities seniors have is ensuring those beneath them have enough knowledge to continue improving the team in later years. The optimal situation is one in which seniors take a hands-off approach and are able to act as advisers.

>Do your mentors do a large chunk of the robot work?

No. They do 0% of the robot work and would rather let the team fail than have to step in. They provide suggestions but at the end of the day it’s up to the students.

>How involved are the majority of students on your team? Do they do a lot of the work, or do mentors?

We technically have “40” students but I find that many of them could not accomplish much of anything if the rest of the team was not there to help them. There are many people who view FRC as a “social club” rather than an engineering team. It’s the unfortunate case that in some years the team is a small group of core students surrounded by people who are not as engaged in learning. And as stated before, our mentors are not hands-on.

>Do your students learn more by themselves or more from other students and mentors?

Students learn from other students. We hold training sessions at the beginning of the year to teach the basics. As the season begins, freshman assist seniors/juniors and gradually pick up on skills. By the end of the season, our freshman are usually pretty competent. (At least the committed ones)

As to your specific situation, I think the problem is definitely mentor involvement. I can’t fathom a team environment in which students sit on their butt while teachers are building their robot… If I were you, I would strongly suggest that your mentors take a hands-off approach and let you do the work. However, if the mentors do all the work and haven’t been properly teaching you, it may be the case that your team quite literally doesn’t have the skills necessary to build a robot without mentor involvement.

If that is the case, then a more gradual roll-back of mentor involvement would be necessary. Rather then having them actually building the bot, have them tell you what to do. Learn from it, and then refine upon that knowledge in the off season. The students should be able to build a robot by themselves. If they can’t, then they haven’t learned enough.

12
  1. It kinda changes from year to year. In 2016, the seniors did the vast, vast majority of the work. This year, the captain’s a senior but the core of the team is a group of juniors and sophomores.
  2. Again, it changes from year to year. In 2015 and 2016, the mentors did increasingly less of the work on the robot. This year, the mentors are doing a good bit more, which I’m very glad about.
  3. The majority of the work is done by a small group of students and mentors. The majority of the students are primarily learning. Some of this learning is done elbow-deep into the robot, but most of it is from observation.
  4. Hmm… this is a tricky one. Like all the other answers, it changes from year to year. I will say that I think each student MUST find and begin training his/her replacement for when (s)he leaves the team. That is one of the biggest responsibilities for students and one that I failed miserably at as a student. That’s one of the many things I regret about my time as a student on an FRC team is that I did not do a better job of finding younger students to assume the roles I took on as a student.

In regards to your entire situation, I think talking about these matters with your mentors and your dedicated students may be the best course of action. If your mentors are already contributing their time and energy (and probably money) to this program, telling them that there are still students that care and have a desire to learn and be successful may be the best way to remotivate them. There’s a good chance your mentors have a nagging voice in the back of their heads asking if what they’re doing is the best way to benefit the students, the best use of their resources and time, or if it’s just worth the effort. Maybe all they need is some affirmation that Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology is happening, and that there are students willing to put in the work to make more Inspiration and Recognition happen.

Course, this also means your fellow students will have to step up; I don’t know which has to happen first. But the mentors have to be present, have to be engaged, and have to set the attitude and environment for the team. And the students have to be willing to learn, willing to work, and willing to have fun.

Good luck! Remember, if these thoughts have occurred to you, it’s very possible that they’ve occurred to others on your team. Reach out to them. FIRST happens in the team meetings and the late nights and the irksome tasks and the fierce competitions. But all of those experiences happen with your team.

13

I will not presume the details of your situation but I feel your frustration and will simply tell you my journey. I have been in this same place before. The moment that changed my direction was when I realized that I donate a vast amount of time and emotion to my students, not the other way around. That allowed me to let go and have them own it. Since then they have never failed to impress me. If they own it, leadership will percolate out of the group. If I owned it I risked “being angry with the minions”. You will be disappointed if you try to fix where you are…just measure your base and grow from there.

So here’s what I did:

  1. Asked the team what they want to accomplish that year. The first time I did that the reply was “we want our robot to move in every match”. It did and they were all winners. The following year they wanted to be above midpoint in qualification…and kinda were, but still felt like winners…etc. The moral of the story is if you coach and mentor them to their goals, with a measure of stretch, they will own their own success and grow. Today the team I’m with decided they want to be in eliminations at World Champs…an probably will.

  2. Ownership is huge for me…so we created an acronym to communicate the ownership to the whole organization. M.E.N.T.O.R. = Motivate and Educate, but No Touching Our Robot. Now, I understand this was not introduced well in the past, so let me clarify…It does not mean I don’t touch the robot, or influence design, it means I can only do so if I ask permission or am invited to do so by the students. This conveys true ownership. It also gives me the opportunity to say, if asked “no, you need to solve that problem…here’s some ideas…” This works great for us and our mentor community, and I want to believe it has created a functional relationship between Students and Mentors.

  3. M.E.N.T.O.R. is also a great way to immediately re-engage alumni who want stay active, by pointing out they have crossed the boundary they are already familiar with. We use alumni quite a bit, because they not only have the most current skills and insight, they are comrades and friends…they are the ones the current students want to be…I’m just the old guy in the room.

My growth and rewards came after I stopped fighting the details and focused on infrastructure and team growth…trust in the students, communicate that trust, and they will do the rest.

P.S. - I was told, and believe, that FRC is designed to mimic the real world - “No enough time, not enough money and not enough resources to do everything you want, so just do your best”.

14

Do you want honest feedback or an affirmation of your thoughts? Looking at your questions, they can be summarized as “do you think my complaints are valid?” And really, nobody can state that from what little we have to go by.

I can share the process I’ve seen on the team I work with. I can share ideally what I’d like to see. I can share what I’ve seen interacting with other teams. But, that would be three different explanations. And honestly, I think seeing that distinction provides you more value than knowing the specifics. Each team is different. Each student is different. Each mentor is different. Each culture is different.

In your time with the team, have you ALWAYS been the hardest working member (including now)? If not, how would you feel if the member(s) working harder views you as not committed?

If your mentors are doing work on the robot and coming to spend their free time with you, isn’t it a little unfair to claim their heart isn’t in it? From a broad stroke, mentors that are putting effort into your robot are mentors that want to see you succeed. I don’t really agree with them doing the work themselves, but I understand where they’re coming from. It’s very difficult to know the answer to a question a student asks and not give it to them. But, I don’t want to build a robot. I want to help provide an experience for the students on my team. I use a technique similar to your survey. I’ll ask leading questions to help them on their path to finding a solution that works. Often, it’s not the solution I originally imagined and that’s amazing.

The most honest thing I can offer you is this: until you’re honest with yourself, you won’t be able to make progress. It’s unlikely you, and your attitude, aren’t a part of the problem. If I look at the short version of the rant, here’s what I hear: “Only a few people work on the robot. The rest don’t care. The mentors don’t care enough to make us care. It’s all their fault.” What are you doing to engage those that show up to the meetings and keep them interested? How are you bringing them into what you are doing? Are you showing them how you write an algorithm? Are you asking for their input or just telling them? Are they late because they just don’t care or because they have a very busy schedule to which FRC is only a part of?

You need to be a tad more fair with your colleagues and honest with yourself. Avoid placing blame and coming into the conversation with that approach.

15

Yeah, sometime you need to be anonymous. You’re forgiven.

  1. Yes
  2. Partly. We try to avoid it.
  3. Hardly, they seem to be there for the college app benefit and little else. Oh and it seems a nice social club.
  4. Those that work do learn from mentors, but some have good knowledge and skill already.

These answers don’t necessarily represent Team 832; I work with several teams.

16

I don’t see the connection between your preliminaries and these questions, but here goes on your questions:

  1. Yes, we have had seniors do a lot of work every year. Even if you are referring to “low level” work, this is the first year we have not had at least one rookie senior. We have two seniors this year, one is our head student programmer, and she’s working like crazy on both programming and Chairman’s. The other is leading the build of manipulators on our second chassis, and yes, he’s very hands on.
  2. As little as we can help. Last night, after a rather simple piece (one straight cut and four holes in a rectangle) was messed up for the fourth time, T. and I stepped in just to stop the bleeding of our budget.
  3. Everybody on the team works, though we do different types of work. We have team members who show up and seem to spend at least half of their time at the shop waiting on something or other, and other team members who track our slack site and keep things moving outside of the build sessions. Some mentors make sure that the facilities and t-shirts and lunch are taken care of, others work mostly on sponsors, and others on design and (when in extremis) fabrication.
  4. Excepting our first two or three years when we were in the bootup stage, the great majority of students who are capable of learning by anything short of failure or pain learn at least as much from mentors and fellow students as by themself. Student mentorship is definitely in our team DNA.
17

Our experience may not be applicable. We are a second year team that is trying to up our game rather ambitiously. Comp and Practice robots. Two Regionals. We are clearly nuts.

But to partially answer the points raised.

Our team of 23 has two seniors. One likes to work alone fabbing things. Another is on software. I would say both are less involved than last year. On the other hand our Build team is almost all young. Our two most productive workers, and probable pit crew chiefs, are a 9th grader and an 8th grader (! but he can mill, weld and work sheet metal).

Mentors don’t build things. I will supervise to reduce waste and slop work. If the team decided plan flops I will make them come up with another idea and for round two will put more specific parts in front of them. Mentors have zero input on decisions such as drive team composition.

I have had to push a bit this year. I usually make up the daily work assignments…otherwise we get too many/too few trying to do things where parts are still on order. I allow a moderate amount of failure. (ball shooter subteam is quite adrift…I told them “tough luck, figure it out!”).

But team mood appears good. Even the less involved members show up pretty regularly and sign up for Regionals is basically unanimous. The occasional cheer goes up when something works perfectly in testing.

On it goes. We are in it for the long haul.

Actually as a Mentor roughly 50% of my job is finding things for a few of our more enthused but less adept members to do. Involvement … but no destroyed parts or injuries…as a team that takes all interested parties you have to accept a range of abilities.

T. Wolter

18

This. It’s a slightly different tone than a lot of what’s said on this forum. We all love robotics, and agree it is a fantastic program for kids looking to get ahead. But, for some, it’s social (75% of my team); for others, a line on the college app that might get them out of school for a few days.

I struggle to get my students involved sometimes. For me, it’s about getting these students exposed to applied engineering principles. I do more work than I “should”, but I feel like the experience would be a bit more wanting if I am not deeply involved.

This is all to say there are all different motivations for students and mentors alike. Your team is very much like a “real world” company in that way- some people want to do as little as possible for their salary- others want to build an empire.

Your investigations with how to deal with the problem show you have good intentions. Stay positive, lack of commitment is actually manageable.

19

From Mentor Perceptive.

A. “Work has to owned by Team”: Meaning ALL Students at ALL Skills can contribute. Even the person Charging Batteries. Work done by mentors is hard to own, by the students!

B. “Leadership can Be Learned”: Meaning dont limit leadership to Seniors or vetrans… ( Our Team Programming team Lead is a 1st Year FRC Robotics Student, but eager to work with a Mentor )

C. “Ask Parents or Mentors for Guidance”: Meaning build team and network with people in the engineering etc. Parents that are Technical are out there even if there dont have students on the Team… Do Demos are local technical places, not just for sponsors but for mentors!

D. “All Teams start with no Structure or Zero Starting Point”: Meaning yes teams all start at same point… close to ground zero… but building from rookie team is FRC!. Some Teams become rookie teams as old team may not sustain. That is normal…

E. Mentor are a the LAST resort to get things done… Have “How To” learning meetings frequently.

F. “Dont get Stuck is Perfection Trap”: meaning yes know when things are Good Enough and come back later to it… Dont Dwell.

20
  • Our team as a whole does not have its heart in the activity.

There are some things that can’t be legislated. Culture and the environment may stem from the mentors and how they manage the team, but at the end of the day, the students have to want it. My team is in its 6th year and I’m glad to say it’s a far more cohesive team than it was in year 1. But the mentors had little to do with it; the students made it happen.

*Our mentors - Don’t get me wrong, they are truly awesome people, but they either don’t really have their heart in it, or they are doing the work that the students should be doing.

All mentors do some amount of work simply because 6 weeks is too short to do so much. But how much is the key. We aim to let the students do as much as possible but in order to learn, students often do have to watch before they do. That said, you can tell how much our students build by visiting our pit when the robot breaks in competition - there’s usually only 1 mentor helping with a repair and several students have their hands on the hardware.

Being a good mentor is not easy. I know many who are good technically but don’t know how to work with teenagers. Others tell and don’t explain. And many can’t make the time commitment that it takes to have day-to-day continuity on the team.

*Our students - Yet again, we have some truly intelligent and hardworking students, but they lack the commitment that is showing up on time, learning and doing some of the more ‘boring’ stuff, and taking initiative. One of our “captains” taught themselves over the summer all the ins and the outs of the robot, and thus they are REALLY good at making the robot be awesome.

There’s 2 facets I struggle with annually - (1) having a team where everyone is involved at some level, and (2) simply being happy that any exposure of STEM to a student is a win. These can sometimes clash. Put another way, I ask “what is the purpose of this team?” Is it just to compete or is there a loftier goal to promote STEM to students who may not otherwise set foot in the door? I can tell you stories of students who are now studying STEM in college who would not otherwise have done so if all we did as a team was focus on the robot. So I don’t worry as much about commitment to the robot as I do about showing up and participating in some way - it doesn’t have to be with the robot, it can be as an artist for our T-shirt, or writing a Chairman’s Award essay. Do I wish all my students would show up on-time? Sure, but I don’t stress about it. Students today are pulled in many directions so I work with what I have.

*Do you have seniors who do a lot of the work on the team?

Yes but not because they are seniors. It’s because they have the most experience. Last year we only had one senior (out of a team of over 50) and the juniors did most of the work. This year I have some freshman who are awesome and I expect them to do most of the work next year as sophomores. I always tell my team that each year is different because students graduate and others enroll. We work with who we have.

*Do your mentors do a large chunk of the robot work?

Not a large chunk. We guide them. We teach them. We let the experienced students teach the newbies. We jump in when needed so that we don’t waste the $5K fee! But we have also let students fail in some way because that too is learning.

*How involved are the majority of students on your team? Do they do a lot of the work, or do mentors?

This varies with each year (as the team changes). We have over 60 students this year and our average group size so far this year is between 20 and 30 students each night. I would guess that maybe 10 students have barely done anything, another 10 are hard-core and have done a lot and 20 have contributed a decent amount. That would leave 20 as occasional contributors.

*Do your students learn more by themselves or more from other students and mentors?

This varies too. I had one student teach himself to program in C++ over the summer. Another learned how to use WPIlib over many nights at home. But when it comes to learning how to apply physics or how to actually build stuff safely, the students learn from the mentors hands-on.

To me, there’s no clear-cut, one-size-fits-all way to run a team. There’s no ideal team either. When I founded this team, I was given a lot of advice from many people but I quickly realized that each team is different; not just from a demographic point of view but also year to year. What works for one team may not work on mine. So we adjust annually how we organize the team. We set goals but we don’t force those goals to be met - we know that it may take some times before we reach them. As I said before we work with who we have.