Needing of some assistance

FIRST General Forum
1

Good day,

I wondering if other teams have had the same issue that we are running into. We are not a big team to begin with. Our roster right now is around 20-25 students. This is down form 30+ we had 3-4 years ago. Of the 20-25 we have on the roster, we have a small group of 5-7 students that are at most of the meetings and do a lot of the work on projects that we are doing.

The problem we are having is the dwindling attendance and it some times seems like a lot on the shoulders of the small group that are always there to get everything done. If you have had a similar situation how did you overcome it and get more students attending meetings and activities?

Thank you in advance for your time and assistance.

2

Team handbook and setting attendance requirements.

Important to note that though that is a terse response - laying out those requirements and crafting them into language for others is a time consuming and nuanced process. You need to have buy-in from students as well as mentors and an enforcement policy as well as a means of enforcing it. It takes some serious thought.

3

Tons of teams go through this every year. We have this “problem” every year but it has been dwindling the last 2 years as we have made it a focus to engage the students more, especially the non core students, earlier in the year before kick off.

To do this we have been having veteran(junior &/or senior) students try and always include and teach the younger students in every activity/task they get. Another thing we do is literally announce/yell out “XXXXX needs to be done who wants to do it?”. I’m not big on assigning people to do things as the quality tends to be better when people are interested in the activity than being forced to do it.

Another thing we have done is to include the elected student leadership in the bi-weekly mentor meetings we have so we can get direct information from the students and have a student voice in the team decisions that get made.

So far the engagement in the students has increased substantially and more students appear to be learning and having fun.

4

Attendance requirements for travel, stricter attendance requirements for lettering.

Designing the team to encourage personal investment and ownership. We have projects required for lettering - something that demonstrates leadership within the team and has a describable benefit to the team. We spreading out our leadership functions to a greater group of students. We have 2 co-captains and 10 other student leads on the team currently, with a roster of about 20 (that’ll go up in the fall when we get incoming freshmen added, probably 25-30 total) Each lead position has a distinct area of responsibility - business, electrical, mechanical, and programming “subteams”, along with “crews” for awards, chairmans, outreach, drive team, safety and scouting/strategy. This both reduces the burden on any single individual and gets more people invested in the success of the team.

A continuous focus on training - every junior and senior is encouraged to work on “training their replacement”, and we do our best to pair older and younger students together for everything we do.

Activities designed to help the students get to know each other better and have fun together. Yes, this is “unproductive” time, in the sense that we aren’t in the shop getting something done. Instead the students are spending a little time having a snack and socializing, or going as a group to see a movie, or whatever. This helps create an atmosphere of fun throughout the entire meeting and season, as opposed to a job of building a robot.

Finally, schedule… I’ve heard some teams that meet every day during the build season for ridiculous hours. While I don’t know what your team does, I will say that you don’t need to meet from 3-10 every weekday and longer on weekends to build a robot - 60 hours a week is insane. If you do, you can expect that people will be in and out, not as committed as you want because they have lives outside of the shop - homework, other extracurriculars, hanging out with friends, etc. Scale back the commitment to something reasonable (we do 15 hours a week) and it definitely helps.

5

This is sort of the fundamental team mentoring challenge in FRC. To some extent you’ll always have a small core group that does a lot of the work but engaging those other students is a worthy challenge.

In my experience, it’s really rare that there are a bunch of students on the sidelines that know how to do something, and are confident in their abilities to do it, but just choose not to. Kids sideline themselves because they lack the confidence to charge forward and do a task, or they lack the guidance to feel particularly qualified to do the task, or they are afraid of screwing it up and making themselves look worse. Addressing all of these concerns takes many, many forms, but anything you can do to improve education, improve guidance, allow room for failure, etc. will make this problem better.

This is part of why I like prototyping and making small groups for things - you can pair the headstrong and knowledgeable students with the more timid students, which combined with a helpful mentor will get more students excited. Giving kids ownership of ideas and concepts early on will push them further later in helping seeing it all through.

Attendance requirements or rules about wasting time definitely have a place, but a strictly punitive approach to this problem isn’t inspiring anybody, and I think it’s kind of a disservice to start and stop there. You’ll only get to keep the kids that already loved robotics and engineering that way, not the ones on the fence who really need the program.

6

I don’t think it is a problem that is ever completely solved. I’ll share one thing that we started doing that had a huge noticeable impact on student engagement. A couple of years ago, interest was higher in our team than we had physical space for so we instituted a “trial period” where new students were told from the start that there were only X spots available at that admittance to the team was based on things like attendance, participation, and completion of assignments.

From the students perspective (I believe) this framed getting a spot on the team as a privileged that only those committed would receive. It set the tone from the start that this is a group of hard workers. It got us automatic engagement because it was tangible evidence that joining makes you part an “elite” group.

In reality, we made the assignments and what-not very very simple to complete (fill out this survey, watch a video from Karthik and write some sentences, etc.). And we only ended up “cutting” 2 or 3 students. But the outward impression was that of prestige.

I think this, in addition to other team building things we do each year (trampoline park lock-in, even car washes) go a long way towards getting newer students invested.

7

Something that we found really boosted attendance was requiring that if someone was going to miss a meeting they email in advance. YMMV.

8

In the medium and long term, go and study what successful teams do and how they do it and adapt what you learn to your team. There is at least one great team within 50 miles of your location. In the activities my sons have been involved with (robotics and swimming) we noticed that people like to join and become committed to successful organizations.

9

Hi Mr. Deal,

I am glad to suggest things that we’ve tried this last year and give my assessment of these attempts.

For background, we’ve typically had ~15 members, at the height we were near 30 (~20-25 is probably ideal), but last year I think only 7 attended the regional. Of course, we took some pretty negative reviews on our Chairman’s presentation critique for the dwindling numbers, so it was a motivation to try to better this year. Just for scale, Ray-Pec is about 2.5x Paola in students, though there are several factors, like mentors and funding, that affect team size, but generally, a team with 30-35 students with ~15 core students seems sustainable.

Back to the issue of engaging and retaining students. First, recruitment is very important. You’ll have attrition, so you should recruit more students. Along with this, you may have to plan to cut some students according to their commitment level to match your team resources, but first, focus on getting people through the door. We didn’t institute cuts, but we did more heavily target recruitment during Freshman Day. We also sent out some “Owl Letters” inviting individual students to join to students suggested by other students or mentors. We ended up having ~20 students to start the season, many younger students.

I didn’t think we’d done well enough to engage new students. Between August and January is a long time, but we have sporadic events that are important to us (Cider Mill Zombie fundraiser, CTTD, Kansas Cup, training). But the first impression of us is often at a club meeting, which is honestly kind of boring for a robotics club. The meeting focuses on the business, and then after we try to have shop time. Unfortunately, new members regularly leave after the business meeting or just don’t quite know how to join in during shop time. We made a more concerted effort to make meetings more fun and engaging this year. We switched up our normal meeting for the new recruits, focusing more on all the things we do, with a short meeting following. Then in the following meetings, we added an engineering activity (penny boats, spaghetti towers, Rockwell Automation challenge, etc) where they competed in small teams (with us intentionally mixing new members and older students together). I do think this improved new member engagement. I’d like to do similar things this year. My main critique is that the simple activities take a little time away from working on the robot or training. I’d like to challenge the new core of students to decide what fun activities we do this Fall, so maybe some more unique things are done. It is a bit of work to plan and prepare activities (especially more complex ones), so the more engaged student leaders can be here is good.

Another thing that helped was having a meetup with another team. We took a couple robots and had a fun afternoon in September with 5119 in Lawrence. We took most of the new students and I think seeing other kids in FIRST so early was helpful. Going to off-season competitions is helpful in that regard, but I really enjoyed the even lower stress social event.

All of this didn’t solve our issues but did nearly double the students who ended up at the competition this year. Which is mildly successful. We don’t have the right infrastructure to keep the ball rolling, and I think that it will be important to work towards that this year. I think one of the issues that cause students to flounder and leave, is that they don’t feel like they are part of things or gaining experience on the team. Mentoring students in more than small groups is challenging, at least for me. I often feel overran during build by several different students needing some attention, and then you have a few students that probably need some attention but they don’t know how to ask you. There has been more help from mentors this season, but for teams of any size, you need students helping to engage the other students. I think this can be cultured, but over a couple seasons, and my hope is to work more towards that this year, first by talking with the veteran team members about it, and then just trying to be more aware of situations where older members can be the mentors to guide them towards that.

Otherwise, I’ll be closely looking at what other teams are doing and hope we can use some of it for ourselves.

10

As Nelson alluded to, you need to plan some activities to keep the students engaged. The team I worked with in the 2017 season recruited a bunch of new team members in September 2017 but neither the student leadership nor the teachers running the team would schedule any activities until December. By that time, many of the new recruits had drifted away.

11

I do appreciate all the good information everyone had given so far. We are trying to get more off season projects going. At the end of this past school year the students voted on building a robotic T-shirt cannon. We got it approved by the school district and have been working on it for the past month or so 2-3 days a week, but have had very few students attending.

I do understand there is a lot of activities going on over the summer with sports, scouts, family vacations and such. But, we were hoping this would be a starting point to get more attendance mainly since the students were the ones that voted to take on the project.

I am taking lots of notes on the ideas that are being provided here. Again
thanks.

12

Make sure it gets completed and is impressive (like seriously, step in and help make it impressive if you have to) and then use it as a recruiting tool next year. Starting early in the Fall helps students feel there is more structure. (Though I’m getting further away from high-school aged each year, but I think I’m right about this)

13

Price’s Law: generally about the square root of the group size will be doing 50% of the work. That’ll be most teams’ starting point and it becomes a game of trying to improve from there.

14

The bottom line is to reward consistency with responsibility - at multiple levels of responsibility, preferably continuously. This encourages the ones who can handle it and want it, and keeps you from thinking you can count on the others. We’ve met two evenings most weeks and approximately alternate Saturdays since competition season ended. We have a half dozen students who are always there unless they’re of town or at work, and another half dozen who are there some of the time, and a third half dozen who only show when we have a “mandatory” meeting about once a month. Mentor numbers are similarly down. We’re getting twice as much done as when we had two dozen students four nights a week and all Saturdays during build season. Guess who our officers will be next year!

And we are quite transparent about this policy.

This direction may or may not help us get more work hours from the team, but it definitely seems to boost the productivity of the shop hours.

15

Lots of good posts on this thread already, just wanted to highlight this point. Engagement, training, encouragement, and guidance (appropriate to the level of the individual student) are the keys. This can come from mentors or from student leaders.

16

One idea for the summer that my team is trying out this year is to have a mock build season with the new people and only the new people. The way it works is that all the veteran members (aka already been through one season) are working on other projects like a battery cart. Then, next years board, to prepare for leading the team during season, will take all the new people and lead them through a mock build season. This year we are going to to do steamworks as our first mock season. We did show them videos and explained what they can be expected to design but we specifically did not show any steamworks videos. Also, we are only meeting three times a week and for three hours each, so it is not a full on build season for a number of reasons. We also are mainly using wood for everything except climbing which will be metal (mainly due to being rookie team so resources are limited). This is our first year so if I remember I’ll post about its success for failure but I think its good because they are all new so they aren’t intimidated or anything by veteran members and can equally contribute. Also, if you want my list of videos for what I think a frc member can be expected to design, just pm me.

17

This sounds great! I tried this on my team but they all disappeared over the summer. Please tell us about the outcome of this project and any lessons you learned.

18

We also used the prestige of pit crew to get more people to come. Just said the most dedicated etc. get to be in pits. We also had our training week before. I think it’s pretty good but still first time. We had four days three hours each. First day was tools. Had stations with different tools, hand and power, showed each group how to use and had them practice. Second day was design stuff. As I stated earlier, showed them a bunch of videos and then at the end, had them design a robot to play dodgeball. Third day was electronics, went over all electronics and had them practice stripping and whatnot at the end. Last day was safety. So I do feel like this training week helps get them excited for mock build season because it gives them a taste of what they’re gonna do and when you see 254 climb in Ultimate Ascent, who doesnt wanna design?

19

Did you call David Blaine and get them back yet?