We have 79:3 currently. It’s slowly killing me.
10:1 is a DREAM.
I don’t know what it is about 3128, but our issues are SO FAR OFF the “normal” issues. Were we born under a bad sign?
(Sorry, week 1 is days away and it’s baaaaad right now)
Why does the team allow so many students and so few adults?
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If you have ways to bring more dedicated adults to FRC teams, I’m all ears.
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I get the feeling he was suggesting reducing team size, not increasing it
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My suggestion is to cut 50 of the kids.
I don’t know anything about how they run their team and I can only assume they don’t have 79 kids present in person at once, but a 26:1 student to adult ratio is insane.
I’d rather have 1/3 as many kids get 3x more out of the program, because there’s basically zero chance the marginal student on a 79 person 3 mentor team is getting anything out of this program other than maybe a safe/warm place in which to do homework.
Also at some point that team probably goes from 79 students to 0 students when the team folds because the mentors are burnt out from such a burden.
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We play bait and switch with parents.
Take time making meetings fun. Go get drinks after meetings and events. Take time to just sit in a room and talk.
3467 is a couple alumni mentors like myself and one other adult who founded the team and didn’t have a student involved. Everyone else has had students on the team and stuck around or has increased their involvement from parent to mentor.
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What you say is certainly fair, and you raise good points.
Also, I’m 100% here for the kids who need a safe, warm place to do homework.
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Who do you say no to?
Which is a big deal for some schools.
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Ok, you asked. (I’m sorry, I rambled, it’s been a tough 24 hours).
We did cut team size. Down to 80. I won’t tell you what it was before.
If there is a school or district rule that governs this, I’ve never heard of it. I’m allowed to travel with NO maximum student:adult ratio (I asked).
We had more mentors- before Covid. Like 9 in early 2020? People moved, jobs changed. Put the mentors left into the proverbial pot, and turn the heat on.
We are UP to 3 mentors now. During Covid, due to California schools online and school district politics, we had ONE mentor allowed in the workshop. (You read that right. Kids could not attend school in person, but COULD attend extracurriculars on campus after school. It’s California. I can’t explain it). ONE mentor kept the team going in person, all year.
Trying to get parents to help has been an exhausting challenge. School rules make it “illegal” for parents to come on campus in person (maybe that changes after March 11?) but getting remote help was damn near impossible.
In a last ditch effort last week, I had to throw down to the kids “if we don’t get parents help IMMEDIATELY, there is no Team next year”.
Some parents showed up, but I got a lot of “why didn’t you ask earlier ??” (Bangs head into laptop- I DID. Perhaps you saw a couple of team emails??).
Before everyone starts throwing stones at me, telling me what I’ve done wrong and didn’t do right and this is all my own fault and of my own making…… don’t bother. A parent beat you to it last night. Came in to “help”, but really came to berate me (for an hour+) for being a terrible mentor, human being, and the root of all evil. (In 5 years with FRC I have never experienced this. Not even close).
And in 48 hours, we leave for a week 1 regional.
Those of you with large cadres of mentors and parent help…. Please appreciate them. I am so very envious.
- Hanging on by her fingernails in San Diego
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It is a big deal but FRC (or any extracurricular robotics program really) should not be the program that solves that problem. It’s like using a sledgehammer to put a rivet in.
That problem is huge and important and it needs more attention but you can’t use an FRC team as a vehicle to realistically fix that issue - though I think there are a ton of organizations to partner with for teams to engage in solving that issue.
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My high school team (2791) had about 120 kids and 4-8 mentors, depending on the weekend, in 2018-2020. The team never cut students because of
- How do you decide who to cut?
- How do you tell them they are cut?
The team grew from 45 kids in 2017 to 100 in 2018, and then to 120 in 2019. It was pretty unexpected and caught everyone off guard.
I’m honestly asking here, because I worry my new team may run into this in a couple of years.
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That’s very true. But there’s a long history of extracurricular activities (sports, clubs) being used as a way to stay just a little longer. Unfortunately that is the only option (or the only option that gets any support, if you want to call it that) in some areas.
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Assuming you do indeed have an offseason, a lot of teams use it as a sort of “try-out” period. It’s made known at the start of the year that the team has a fixed capacity, chosen in advance. Like a varsity sport, students are expected to show up, learn, and contribute. The mentor(s) then get the task around December of sorting out how many X students should continue with the team. Those who don’t make the cut are encouraged to try again the following year.
I know a number of teams which have this built in and just do it. Transitioning into it is the hardest - but once you’re there and the expectation is set, it seems to work reasonably well for my handful of samples.
This doesn’t enforce any particular size limit, that’s up to the mentor(s) to choose what they can handle.
It also doesn’t stop students who don’t make the cut from participating in some other way, or like you couldn’t have some form of a JV team. But, that’s just more of a resources question.
I’d expect for high-ratio teams, a lot of the students have fairly high leadership responsibilities in terms of the technical and planning aspects of the team. For the sake of said above conversation, I’d treat those students like (or almost like) mentors, as far as their role goes in maintaining team size.
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At the risk of too much thread drift, we went through this problem - the team grew explosively about 10-12 years ago.
Step one is accepting that there’s no perfect solution and you inevitably will cut (or reject an application from) kids who could have made the team better or who the team would have made better. Unless you have a crystal ball you can’t see these things in advance and you have to choose to do what’s best for the team/your own mental health.
It’s taken most of those 10 years and many different approaches to selecting team membership to get to a place we mostly like.
There are tons of different approaches:
Institute an application next year for all members. It’s impossible to choose from freshmen with no experience, so you might let all of them join, but have clear standards for all members to maintain membership on the team
There are very few teams where it isn’t very clear to the mentors (and students) exactly who the dead weight is. Effective mentorship can help turn some of that dead weight into assets, some just don’t really care. Should be pretty easy to reject those returning member applications.
I firmly believe a team of 25 to at most ~50 where every kid is there every day that you meet (or darn near every day) is going to get far more out of the program (and likely lead to a more competitive team) than a team full of students who drift in and out. Depending on mentor staffing levels, this could be adjusted downward, but I don’t think it can be adjusted upward without a significant number of kids working on purely nontechnical tasks.
For a long time we tried to track hours and use that as a metric for various things (competition attendance, maintaining your team membership, etc), but this incentivizes people to do the minimum and show up just enough to not get cut. You find that a lot of kids you’ve never seen start showing up near whenever the hours deadline approaches.
Once we cut hours requirements we didn’t need to worry about the same set of problems, but the team was still artificially too large and physical overcrowding (with a subset of random kids who didn’t show up much) of the lab became the biggest issue. It sounds like a minor thing, but for our group of mentors this was the number one turn off to spending more time at the lab. If your environment isn’t comfortable to be in, due to constant noise, no ability to move around freely, etc people won’t want to come there.
From the mentorship side, it becomes incredibly hard to point to meaningful impact you’re making on individuals when you have so many kids that you can only spend at most a minute or two with each of them during each build session.
Our team is very different than many, so this approach may not be as suitable, but FRC is serious business - if you’re a member of the football or basketball team you don’t just get to not show up to practice. You schedule your life around making it to every single practice/game, if you want to be a leader/starter. Many FRC teams are likely more competitively successful than their school’s football or basketball programs, so why should they operate any differently?
It requires an attitude shift to move to a model where membership is a privilege and is something that can (and should) be hard to maintain, but once you do that I think you’ll find your students and mentors are more motivated, productive, happy, and learning more.
As far as telling them they’re cut, that part is pretty easy - you’re either not accepting an application, or you’re cutting them due to not complying with the clearly laid out standards for maintaining good standing on the team. The hard part is if you’re the one in the position to get chewed out by the angry parent of said student who got cut/denied acceptance.
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If you assume that some portion of your students are dead weight and won’t improve after mentorship, aren’t you setting up that student for failure? I’ve never seen a student who doesn’t improve with good mentorship. Sometimes it takes more time, and sometimes you’re bringing them from a 1/10 to a 2/10, but there is improvement.
I can empathize with the desire (or need) to cut students, but it seems much more complicated than this, to me. If your goal is to have the most competitive program possible, treat it like a sports team and do some kind of tryout, sure. But if your goal is to have the greatest impact, that leads you to keep the students with the greatest potential for improvement. I’m sure most teams that cut students find somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. But it’s hard.
As a separate note, when I was a student, the team had anywhere from roughly 15-35 students. There was one “full time” mentor (as in, came to all meetings and events) for most of that time – two at one, brief point. This was supplemented by a teacher and parent or two for travel.
I still learned and grew a tremendous amount. I was fortunate enough to have students a few years ahead of me who really knew their stuff, and were great guides for the newer students. We kept that up over the years, and the knowledge continues to transfer.
I’m not saying one mentor for 35 students is ideal, but there’s also no one-size-fits-all approach to a student:mentor ratio. What one would traditionally call a “student-run” team is viable. (Read: me, as a student, booked team travel way back when)
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I wish it weren’t so, but I have. Not all minds are malleable.
Regardless, it’s a tradeoff of resources. Do you invest your hours into one student to bring them from 0/10 to (maybe) 2/10 performance? Or do you invest your time in five students to bring them from 5/10 to 9/10? Or in 50 students to get some of them from 4/10 to 5/10?
I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that - rather it depends on where the team values and resources are at.
Given their underlying student population and track record of 254, I feel pretty confident I have a good idea where their current focus is. No shade in the least - it’s part of the wonderful diversity of the program that you can have teams with different focuses, all with positive outcomes. I constantly point my students to their program, asking them to think critically about how we can incorporate their best facets, all without loosing the good we value on our own team.
Trying to wrap back around to OP… and tie this in - the context is that teams with diverse priorities need flexible policies, and a 10:1 ratio cap applied right before competition cuts out some percentage of teams. Obviously, not good. But it sounds like change is already underway, which is good!
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This is starting to lead us into the old question of whether FRC is a suitable program for the number of teams that attempt to participate. The Poofs are exemplary in many ways, especially in terms of competitiveness, but objectively there are highly successful teams in the same metrics applied to 254 who have much larger numbers of students and very different team structure. I’d also argue that FRC doesn’t dictate what metrics a team needs to judge themselves against, other than recognition and inspiration, and for some teams these are met with even non-competitive robots.
But still. I’ve long struggled with whether FRC needs to be the first choice for schools that cannot (for whatever reason) meet the high demands of mentorship, use of space, time commitments, and financial cost. And your point reminds me again that I always have to think twice about recommending this program for schools that really can’t handle these demands. I’ll hop off this tangent now.
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I think the canonical case is the kid who really has no interest in being there but their parents thought it would look good on their college application, so they signed them up.
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Very very hard. That’s me with Team 359.
It’s amazing how a parent’s point of view vs. the team can be the opposite on so many levels.
As if, we are talking about 2 different students.
I follow due process and school protocols. It’s unfortunate, but like anything else, you do what you feel is fair, and what protects the culture of your program.
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I don’t disagree with your points, they are all valid, just a difference in ideals across the spectrum of mentorship.
I don’t participate in this program to try and take 0’s and bring them to 2’s and neither do the rest of our mentors. Some mentors may take great satisfaction in that - kudos to them.
It’s also a different story if you’re a paid teacher vs a professional volunteering your time. The former has some obligation to not leave any children behind, the latter not so much.
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