Maturity comes with time, dedication, and experience. I suggest giving those kids a responsibility to do, whether it be safety captain or pit design lead and hold them to that responsibility. This will teach them to lead a project and they can have something to claim as their own. If you give those students the ability to be mature, then they will most likely rise to the occasion and show you they can do that. If that doesn’t fix your problem, then you have a bigger issue at hand. But this will hopefully give the kids dedication to the team, and they should grow to love robotics more as time goes on. Feel free to PM me if you want to follow up on specific issues.
We had significant problems with this in recent years. But it really reached a peak last season, we had a number of dedicated students, a number of consistently off task students, and a larger number that would lean either way depending on what was going on. Our productivity really suffered because of this. We were seemingly more of a social club than a let’s build robots club. We also had a large problem with students disrespecting each other and our mentors.
So last year we finally decided to do something about it. We knew that if we wanted to be a successful team our culture had to change. If you were going to show up you had to be expected to do work. We tried a number things to enforce this idea some of them worked and some of them failed horribly. We tried implementing a JV Varsity system… that was a dumpster fire.
Once we started trying to enforce that people needed to be doing work we started to get some push-back. It was a good thing our captain last year had pretty thick skin because he got some serious flack about trying to have people actually do work.
Our plan worked, but not quite how we expected. Going into this year many of the students who weren’t productive did not return to the team (mainly due to outrage at some of the ideas implemented to get them to do work). This was unfortunate because we would have preferred that they do what some of our other students did and recognize that they were expected to do work, then show up and do it. They were awesome people and friends of mine and I was really sad to see them leave.
Our intention was not have students leave the team, it was to change our team culture to one that valued hard work and success. We accomplished this, our team culture is now what we wanted it to be and I think our success this year proves our current culture is better than our previous one.
So my suggestion to you, OP. Is to try all the things you can to encourage your students to do work. Call them out when they aren’t being productive and make it clear that your team is a place where work gets done. And don’t back down if they give you flack about it. Hopefully your students will recognize your teams desire for success and change their attitudes. But I can tell you from experience that if they don’t, as unfortunate as it is, they might just leave, which also solves your problem.
I realize this probably sounds really harsh. And it probably is, but I have rather negative feelings associated with the process and that probably comes out in this message. OP this is not going to be easy for you, in fact it’s really going to suck, but it will be worthwhile for the future of your team. (If you want proof search 159 on TBA and check 2015 against 2017)
Honestly even if I could tell everything that has happened it may take a book. A group of people, now recently graduated, put the team on the map, and now many on the team would rather spend their time deliberately hindering the flow of work than doing work themselves.
Well, there’s no quick fix. And unfortunately, when you have a strong class or two that can shift the focus of the team off those behind them, leaving a leadership gap that hurts the next year or two. So, the next couple of years may be rough, but you can use them to create a structure that can ensure you are constantly developing your youngest students and preparing for the future.
For us, it all starts with our lettering requirements. The preface to our requirements is:
Lettering for The Robettes means that, as an individual, you went above and beyond routine expectations. The individuals that letter took on extra tasks to help the team achieve its many goals. Students that letter are expected to show competency in the following eight categories.
Those categories are:
- Attendance is necessary to ensure everything gets done. It’s up to those in leadership positions to ensure everyone has work to do, and the leaders can often use that for other items below.
- Competition attendance - The team can’t be successful if we don’t have enough people to do everything that’s needed at our events.
- Meet the student expectations listed in our handbook. This is a list of 13 expectations we have for students, which includes items like gracious professionalism, taking the initiative to tackle work, academics, etc.
- We have a short list of mandatory events everyone has to attend. Things like kickoff and sponsor events.
- planning and leading a project - Everyone has to come up with a project that will challenge them, plan it out and execute. In many cases this is leadership-centric - sub-team leads will plan out the build season and ensure everyone has something to do, someone will plan and execute an outreach event, including recruiting other students to attend. Other times, the project is something designed specifically to improve the team, like building a new electronic scouting system or creating something that can be useful for work on the robot and presenting to judges.
- We practice communication throughout the build season, and need to see everyone participating and growing in their discussion during our meeting wrap ups. It’s basically preparation for talking to other teams and judges at competition. More experienced students are expected to take this to the next level, and often take their technical skills to present at a local multi-team training day.
- Everyone has to participate in our outreach activities.
- Finally, they have to demonstrate, throughout the season, an improvement in their technical skills. For rookies, this could be as simple as learning how to use all the tools. As students progress through the program, they have to keep pushing themselves in what they accomplish. The path taken is different for every student, but we do need to see progress each year.
All of these items are designed to help individual growth while accomplishing the teams objectives. And over half the team letters each year, including many freshmen. It’s really amazing the growth you can see from people when they know the expectations and how to go about satisfying those expectations. That said, there are always going to be some people that don’t grow as much as you would like. It just takes them longer. There’s nothing wrong with that, you just need to keep pushing them to grow an achievable amount.
Finally, when people are causing problems with their immaturity, it’s time to ask them step out of the shop. It’s as simple as that. They have to go do another task where their antics won’t cause safety concerns or detract from what the team has done. We’ve found that sometimes that’s all it takes to make someone get serious and show serious growth. It’s really amazing how the biggest team clown one year can turn into a productive, hard working member the next.
Where are the mentors here? Is this a high school-based team? Do you have a teacher on the team?
I have to take on the task of telling a student to stop showing up because their presence is a distraction. I give two fair warnings prior to that, and usually that does the trick. But each year I have to tell one or two students that they are no longer part of the team.
Members need to know that productivity is required. Freshmen get a bit of leeway as they get experience through their first season, but even in such situations, if they bring negative productivity to the meetings they will be suspended or removed.
It takes bold action to sometimes say to a group that is having a great time but doing no work, “OK, everyone here go home right now and when you come in tomorrow be ready to get things done, or don’t come back.” Such a task is very difficult for a student to say to other students, which is why good mentorship is important.
As a junior on our team, I can feel where you are coming from. Sometimes the younger members on our team do screw around a bit (nah, us upperclassmen would never do that hehe). Anyways, I’ve noticed a major cause of this is them having a lack of things to keep them busy.
Making them feel like they are doing work to help the team succeed better will probably motivate them to up their game and behave professionally. For example, involving them in prototyping and testing. Or giving them side projects such as a robot cart or driver station dashboard. Of course your situation may have specific nuances, so YMMV.
Edit: Totally missed that there was a second page to this thread, so what I made note of has been explained excellently above as well.
I’ve seen a problem similar to yours in terms of unproductive members. The type of people who will sit at a computer for 8 hours and accomplish nothing. These types of people come in all grades, but are usually first year members. As a senior student, I wanted to understand why some students carry the team forward far more than others.
What I discovered is that it’s not a problem with wanting to make the team better, it’s a problem with knowing how to be productive.
Everyone on the team understands the commitment, the stakes, and the level of productivity that is expected of them. The unfortunate case is that some students simply don’t know what to do. The reason they sit at a computer for 8 hours is because they lack responsibilities, direction, a leader, a job, or just FRC knowledge in general. They feel completely lost and most are too shy to fix this problem alone.
This is not their failure, but a failure of the mentors and the senior students. I’ve found that we tend to neglect the less assertive students. We don’t go out of our way to ensure quiet students have a responsibility within the team. We sort of just leave them on the backburner and forget about them.
Now, I don’t know you or your team personally, but I wonder if you’re having this same problem. Your students may very well be completely lost in terms of what they think they are expected to do.
If this is the problem, then the solution is more guidance from old members and mentors. Stick those kids on a subteam, give them a deadline and project details. Make sure they know exactly what they’re doing and have old members guide them through the process. You say they respect the older members, if that’s the case then they should have no problem working alongside them.
Even if you’re not at all religious or not Christian, let me recommend the parable of the talents (Matthew 25 14-30). It’s a great insight into leadership and responsibility. The TLDR from the leader perspective is: If you want something done, get a busy person to do it, and from the worker perspective is: If you want the job, DO the job.
From our very early years, 3946’s stance on responsibility and leadership is: The mentors will lead until and unless a student takes the job away from us. Sometimes it happens in September, other times it doesn’t come until much later, or even never. Over the years we’ve added: and we’ll take leadership back if you abandon it. Some years, we (the mentors) go to competition doing fill-in scout work, and others we are running the pit or keeping the schedule. At various points throughout the pre-build and competition season, the mentors recognize and “pin” our officers (team captains and lieutenants), and later depend on those officers to recognize and “pin” key positions like pit and drive crew. We use army-based insignia and rank names, mostly because our founding mentor was an army vet. The key is that we RECOGNIZE leadership, and legitimize it. Trying to create leadership by an election or appointment is far from a certain prospect at the scale of millions, and is a long shot at the scale of dozens.
Kind of two rambles that say the same thing different ways; hopefully you can find some help in them.
Addition: Another thing that has helped in recent years is when we introduced “tryouts”. In 2015, we had far more students interested in joining robotics than we had facilities or mentors to handle. As such, we created a bunch of “tryout” tests, which students ran in a “stations” methodology over several sessions. About half of the applicants selected themselves out by not finishing tryouts, and the mentors and veterans culled a few others based on attitude. We never excluded someone based on their inability to complete a task (though we might have steered them away from programming, for example), but when a student asked to build a tower from a pile of weird parts didn’t bother to put one piece atop another, he was gone. We made the tests look like aptitude, but we selected on attitude.
Thank you all for your advise expecially concidering how vague I was with everything. Your insight will undoubtedly help us in the future. This is why I love the FIRST community, people look out for one another dispite the competitive nature of comp. Please known you have our gratitude. I wish you all the best of luck in the future.
You present a very good point. Our team has always allowed 8th graders to join (I actually joined as an 8th grader, and am now a senior and CEO) and we have found that the younger we can pull kids in, the more enthusiastic they are about the team.
We did find that 8th grade is a cut-off though. We have faced some serious maturity and commitment issues when we’ve allowed a few 7th graders to join the team.
To the main concern of this thread though:
I don’t know the entirety of your situation, but it sounds like you just need some adults to step in and “boss” these kids around. If that’s not really a possibility, I would get a group of the “mature” members together to discuss what might be done. You may very well need to approach your immature members and present the issue to them, pointing things out by instance if necessary. All of my members know that if they are fooling around and I find out about it, that I will say something to them, or just tell them to get to work.
Unfortunately, with many high-schoolers, they just don’t have a get-things-done attitude yet. Make sure you remind them of why you are there - to build robots, to get things done, etc. If you end up having some real issues, you may have to kick them off the team (if that’s possible). But always remember: FIRST is a program where you will get out what you put in. You put in a lot, you get out alot. You put in nothing, and you’ll get a social experience - ultimately waste of time.
If the captains care deeply for the team and put in their time, effort, and lives into the team; then those other students are NOT respecting the captains. Your captains can set the expectation that “I feel ownership for the success of this team. If you don’t, then you are a burden”. Letting those in charge kill themselves with work is very disrespectful.
In order to get to a point where those other students are contributing though, you need to give them projects where they CAN take ownership. They need enough skills to meaningfully contribute. Give them those skills through training. Set the expectation early that if they don’t engage in learning those skills, they will be asked to not participate. Then actually follow through on that. Once they have enough skills to meaningfully contribute, put them in a group working on a project. Make sure that the group is capable of completing that project. At the end of the project, **some **of those people will have grown into more mature individuals who take pride in their work on the team.
That’s a very simplified explanation. Use your own experiences (plus the ideas of those here who are much smarter and more experienced than me) to inform what you do.
As a 4th-year lead mentor and the now coach of a rookie FRC team, I have seen maturity issues manifest in multiple ways. From not showing up to practice, to not doing anything productive, playing on phones, disappearing when a job needed to be done etc. The best way I have found to combat these issues is to have students rely on each other and have high expectations. I use this same process in my classroom and for 80% of every student it works, for 100% of student who want to be there it works. It may result in failed matches or the robot not working perfectly but it gets the point across. We win as a team and we fail as a team.
The reality is teenagers are learning how to be responsible and productive, most don’t already know how to do this, they are figuring it out. I like to manage the team through coaching, student leadership, and failure. Set high expectations, work alongside the students and build the team.
As Bo Schembechler at Michigan always said, " The Team, The Team, The Team."
Finally, sometimes you just get a great group of students and your rookie team makes it as an Alliance captain at Worlds!
Sometimes you have to let them fail. That’s a hard thing to do when we as adult mentors are also invested in the team and want to succeed. But if the students don’t show up, don’t do the work, goof off, and the end result is still an award-winning robot that places highly at competition, then what was the lesson learned? At best it’s that their behaviour was acceptable and didn’t have a negative impact on the team. At worst it’s “see? you didn’t even need me.”
So students should be given expectations and deliverables, and they should be held to that. The flipside is that you have to manage this carefully. There are some things that, if the student drops the ball, you can use as a lesson learned. (Oh well, you didn’t have time to make your robot look pretty. Maybe next year!) There are other things that could be devastating to the team and turn the student into a scapegoat. (Sorry everyone, Joey forgot to book the hotel rooms, guess we’re all staying home!) You don’t want to throw them to the wolves, but you want to them to understand that there are consequences to their (in)actions.
Don’t just punish the bad behaviours. Reward the good ones. On our team we’re able to give more responsibilities to the students that can demonstrate reliable attendance and a willingness to get things done. These students bubble up to become subteam and project leaders. There are other students who can only come occasionally due to their busy schedules and that’s OK too. Leadership is not bestowed as a “prize” for good behaviour, it is a natural consequence.
One of FIRST’s slogans is “the hardest fun you’ll ever have” and that’s exactly the culture you want to foster on the team. If your expectation is that they’ll work like slaves and have no fun, then they’ll stop showing up. And you already know that too much fun and no work is not productive either. But fun isn’t a bad thing. I allow (even cough encourage) a certain amount of silliness, especially amongst our younger students, but the trick is teaching them that there’s a time and place and then you need to be able to flip the switch and get work done.
Agreed, it really comes down to the “real-time” engineering at the competition that they actually see the result of not getting to work with the proper efficiency, then a failure is a missed task or damage to the robot and much more immediate. Put up a visual of what should be accomplished each week of the build season and cross it off. Students need that feedback especially if they are new to engineering or FRC.
The advice here is great!
One additional suggestion I might offer is to talk to these students in order to learn what really interests them. If these students are attracted to the socially enjoyable aspects of the team but don’t find any compelling legwork, they might feel like a fifth wheel. I like to think that everyone possesses at least one talent that would benefit an FRC team. Perhaps it’s just a matter of learning a little more about them and finding a way to harness their passion.
Something to be on the lookout for when talking to unengaged students is to try to gauge their confidence level when trying new skills. It’s a lot easier to try to look busy than risk looking foolish while attempting something new. If it’s an extremely supportive environment where students understand that imperfection is an expected part of the learning process, they’ll be a lot more likely to get involved.
One more thing our team has run into is competing for student time. Sports, theater, music programs, math olympics, early college programs, not to mention homework and school projects, all compete with the limited time that students have. Students who practically live at these meetings get all of the work while students who can only make a fraction of the meetings end up coming in not knowing where they fit. It’s important to plan your team activities so students don’t have to have cult-like devotion to be productive.
Mind you, I throw all of that out not knowing anything about your specific situation. YMMV. Good luck!
They are also representing themselves. People who don’t care about team, school, state, nation, etc. will still usually care about themselves.
It’s interesting you should say that… One of our rookie students this past year jumped out at competition and started leading cheers and dancing in the stands, having a great time. When we had a pep rally for the team, however, she just wanted to be in the back and not say anything. She didn’t want to risk embarrassing herself in front of people she knew and saw every day.
People are much more willing to do stuff around strangers, people they’ll never have to see again, than they are around their peers that they see every day. They may risk looking bad in front of strangers, but always take the safe path when among friends. You have to build up a sense of responsibility and a desire to impress those around you if you want to drive good behavior.
I have to say I understand this problem on a deeper level. Every single day my team has kids who come in and watch movies, joke around, and generally drag everyone else down. I am 100% going to use some of the strategies put down in this thread. thank you so much.
Some of the “symptoms of immaturity” that some of the posters in this thread cite may be signs of lack of ownership. When the team members own the solution to a problem and actually wan the team to succeed, they will work diligently on that solution. When they don’t own the solution, they are more likely to only put in token efforts. I have seen the same sort of behaviours in my coworkers at previous jobs where we had bosses who micromanaged their staff and dictated every little detail without taking input from the staff.
A good starting point to solving the problem is brainstorming (or, heck, pulling them aside and asking) why the student is not engaging.
Answers could include:
- I am simply too young/too immature to “get it” (this comes with time)
- I really don’t care about any of this, I’m just here for the free food/academic credit/my parents made me come/be with certain friend/impress a girl/impress a boy (self-entitlement exceeds sense of responsibility to the team, I don’t feel connected to the team or that the team members are my friends)
- I don’t know how and I’m afraid to ask because people will make fun of me (early onset Imposter Syndrome? A sign of not having strong relationship with team members, possibly a sign that mentors are not catching these issues early enough to offer a helping hand before it becomes overwhelming)
- last time I tried this I failed and everyone made fun of me (team culture)
- I’m afraid if I fail I’ll let down the team
- I don’t feel motivated/challenged by the available work (not enough work, too many people, not learning, too trivial)
- I don’t feel like the work adds value to the team (don’t understand the strategic or bigger-picture/long term value, feels like being given busywork)
- I don’t feel like I add value to the team (self esteem, not feeling sense of belonging, not feeling like my views are respected or considered, maybe a sign of communication issues on the team)
- I am unable to work in this environment (too noisy, too crowded, can’t concentrate, don’t have proper equipment, my laptop is too slow)
- Johnny told me that I need to just shut up and stay out of the way (bullying or power struggle issues on the team)
Solutions to those, of course, vary wildly.