I’ll keep it short and sweet, what is the best way your team has found to deal with students slacking (on their phones, horseplaying, etc.)?
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What have you tried so far?
edit: I do mean that as what works for one team might not work for others. Not trying to shut down getting ideas.
In our team we track hours. So uncalled for behavior could be punished by not receiving the hours they want.
You would tell/warn them first, then remove the hours. (We need hours to get credit in our school so it’s a big incentive.)
If it continues, elevate it to a talk with the president and adults on the team – they’ll hate that and stop.
Now if it’s a large portion of students that’s a slightly different issue that others will probably have better advice for.
I am just entering a leadership position this year, so I am just looking for ideas right before build season. In the past we have just let them run their course, but we would like a little more workforce this year is why I am asking.
We’re a smaller team.
Usually a reminder to keep stuff like that to before/after practice works for us.
The other skill that has been VERY valuable to develop over the years has been to keep an eye out for idle hands.
I will drop 95% of what I’m doing to make sure students are working on something.
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Horseplay gets kicked out of the shop due to safety reasons. Outside, or home, but no horseplay. And everybody knows it, because we go over that in the mandatory safety stuff every year.
If they’re on their phones or whatever… it really depends what they’re doing and where they’re doing it. Homework isn’t slacking, for example. Generally I wouldn’t do much about it, they’re not getting much out of the program (and of course you can note that they’re not being productive for things like travel lists). But, if they’re in the way/in danger, they need to move elsewhere (safety); if they’re distracting others then you may need to break up the huddle after a few minutes.
My favorite way to deal with people who are not doing productive work is to find some work that needs doing (including shop cleanup, but not limited to that) and find someone who isn’t being productive and introduce them to the work. “Hey, we need this done, and you (or y’all if it’s multi-person) look like you’re available to do it. Can you make some progress on it this meeting, please?”
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Not getting the benefit of my mentorship is its own punishment
(But really… your fellow students will get out of this experience what they put in, and that should be OK. Everyone lives a full life with a lot happening that may be inaccessible to you.)
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From a mentor perspective, FRC is a game of expectation setting, motivation, and accountability.
I’m going to add two caveats at the top: 1) I am a fairly fresh-faced mentor, and 2) this is a conversation that you should also have with your mentors. Students ordering other students is a tough situation for everyone, so make sure that you and your teams mentors are on the same page.
Expectation
In the off-season, you want to define the expectations for your students. How often are they expected to show up? How much slack do they get with that? How responsive are they supposed to be on Slack/Discord/email/whatever? What behaviors are they supposed to model, and what happens if they don’t?
I’ve personally found that you generate a lot more buy-in from students if they are involved in creating these expectations. On my old team, we developed what we called the GP pledge. Students and mentors worked together to design and phrase it, and every student signed a copy of it leading up to the build season. It hung on our wall in the shop and at our pit.
The other part is two-fold: keeping students engaged and motivated, and giving them opportunities to benchmark themselves.
Motivation
A student who is involved is a student who’s not going to mess around as much. Obviously this is a program for primarily high schoolers, so it’s not fair to expect 100% serious work (and I think teams probably function better with fun and goofing off, but I don’t have empirical evidence to back that up).
Some things you can do:
- Give your team members responsibility. A student with a title (and a set of responsibilities to go with that title) has a good chance of being more involved. Don’t go out of your way to bloat your structure, but find ways to give students special, useful responsibilities. Who are your team leads? Who are your project leads? Who’s in charge of tooling or pit supplies? There’s always something to do. On my current team, I’m looking for ways to cross-train my non-tech students too. Can we teach them to help with assembly? Can I train one or two to run the CNC router? Giving your students more tools means they can take on more autonomy and responsibility.
- Generate more buy-in. This is sorta nebulous, but the goal is to be engaging. When I was a student, I was less likely to be paying attention if things were being dictated to me. As a leader (mentor or student), one of the ways you can generate buy-in is by putting more decision-making power into students’ hands and then guiding them through those decisions. Instead of saying “no that won’t work, we’re doing it this way”, try and find ways to politely challenge their ideas. “Can you find examples of this mechanism in previous, similar challenges?” “What sort of tradeoffs will this decision lead to, and are those tradeoffs we want to make?” Things like that.
Accountability
You’ve got some pretty straight forward things here:
- Keeping track of student involvement time. Here’s Team 66’s GrizzlyTracker. There’s plenty of options out there to log time. You’ve got everything from pencil and paper to slackbots to biometric in and out scanning. Set expectations for how many hours students should be participating, and then figure out who is meeting the threshold.
- Consider adding an outreach requirement too! This is something that I picked up from 1902 I believe. Set the goal that every student is attending x hours of outreach events (6814 set it to 5 hours). It helps hold interest and involvement through the off-season too.
- Consider creating things contingent on those hours. This is one that you have to tread really lightly on, because FRC needs to stay accessible to everyone who wants to be involved. My current team has a participation threshold, and anyone who passes the threshold (averaging 3 of our 4 meetings per week) travels to comp for free. Other students are able to come, but they have to pay their own way.
- Schedule in breaks! Build days, especially weekends, are long. Students burn out. Mentors burn out. Robots burn out. You’ve gotta manage that burnout. Put in specific times to pause, get some fresh air, and relax. Realistically, I’m planning to make sure my students are getting a decent 20-30 minute break every 2 hours or so, but it might be different for your team (and heck, it’s probably different for my students too, since many of them are new to in-person build).
Ending thoughts
A lot of this is stuff that’s more applicable on a longer timescale than “what can I do in the next three weeks to whip my team into shape”, but hopefully some of these give you ideas. Keep your students involved, make sure they know what’s expected of them, and listen to their feedback. Being a student leader in FRC is an incredibly empowering experience, so enjoy it, and do your best to help your fellow teammates thrive.
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Letting it play out is an option. I think that is more what has happened for us this fall. We started with students circled up talking and not doing much, and lately they feel like after meetings they are working on tasks for the most part. Some of that is getting some engaging things for them to work on. We are doing some outreach for the holidays, and that has been a team effort. Hopefully that level of working stays through the season start. I think kickoff can be engaging.
We’ve tried a couple things with varied success.
As mentors or leaders, I think making sure you aren’t doing too much of each project and letting students do more of it helps with engagement. It is tough to do this with students that you are just trying to be more productive obviously. But I think letting them be the driver as much as is safe is good, and especially when you are starting new projects that they have input.
We started having one student each meeting be tasked with helping other students that are not engaged to find a place to help. We assign that person each meeting. It may be a weekly assignment during build (or certain days, etc). I think the person in the role hasn’t been too influential yet, but I think the idea and having a student doing that along with mentors is a good idea.
We use punch lists, and try to have students sign up with what they are working on that night. That sometimes works well, but not everyone signs up. So usually someone has to get unfilled items some workers.
We’ve had cubbies for cell phones, but that was sort of an idea that never took off. It wasn’t my favorite idea. I didn’t see cell phone use for us being the driver of inactivity ymmv.
We do have hours in-season, but it has been a few years since hours were judged against productivity. It takes a person running that to make that work as a system, and is not maybe work the extra tracking unless you have someone to do that.
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This is dead on, Robotics, and the build room specifically is NOT the place to be messing around. That behavior is not tolerated on our team, and we make sure the kids know it ahead of time. We also have a safety captain who keeps us updated on safety procedures and we bring up any issues during end meetings without calling people out specifically.
As far as idle hands, that’s for us is a cultural thing. We instill in our kids that if they don’t have a job, it’s their duty to speak to their subteam lead/Mentor for something to work on. Something we’ve done in the past that worked was creating a list of SLJ’s (sh***y little jobs). It was a list of things that weren’t super critical or fun, but needed doing eventually. If the subteam lead or mentor didn’t have anything to assign, they could pull something from the SLJ list.
As far as phone use, again this is cultural for us. Kids know upfront that when they are at robotics they are there to work. Obviously they can check their phones for calls/messages, research stuff, ect, but if someone is just playing games, this gets noticed and brought up to mentor for correction. If the behavior persists, that student will have a sit down with our Coaches to assess their commitment to the team.
I’ll echo what other people in this thread have mentioned requiring signing in. Our kids sign in when they arrive and sign out when they leave. If they have to do homework, they sign out for that duration. Their worked hours are a factor in whether they earn a varsity letter for Robotics, so hour tracking is important to us.
For a lot of this stuff, it’s about the culture your team perpetuates. We don’t have the space or time for people who are just hanging out, and since we recruit in July/August, kids know what it takes to be on the team WELL BEFORE build season. Kids that are just hanging out usually end up dropping out of the team of their own volition, and in rare cases of persistent disruptive behavior we’ve had to remove people.
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A number of good points above.
We recruit very long term via our middle school programs (not FLL or Vex, but that’s another story), so we have few casual wander ons. The kids who join generally know the routine, and corrective measures are seldom required.
I will say that old game elements are just such a temptation to horse play. Those darn yellow balls are just askin’ to be thrown. And as for pool noodles… Keep that stuff stowed away.
This year’s team voted for a Week One event. I told them this meant zero wasted time in the “old school” build schedule. They understand this.
Our last pre holiday meeting tomorrow. Sub team leads are going to present a tentative build time line. Strongly suggest you do the same, as this will keep idle hands busy. Set benchmarks. Drive train decision here. First iteration of manipulators here. Of course you’ll have to adapt, there are always setbacks. Weather, illness minor and otherwise, prototypes that flop. But have a plan. And into that plan make sure you set up medium priority projects that can proceed while higher level stuff (CAD, etc) is underway. Field element and bumper construction. Spare parts you know early you’ll need. We have a near finished new transport cart to polish off and our pit structure has to be replaced. Most idle kids just want something to do. Find it for them.
For our pre season meetings I make some allowances. We’ve been meeting once a week, 4:00 to 7:00. That’s a long stretch after they have already been out of bed, on the bus, in school since 7am or so. Sure they tend to kick back and relax by 6:30. That’s ok so long as clean up and such is also happening.
OK for preseason that is…
T
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There have been a lot of suggestions from many people in this thread. How did you all put into effect the cultures you have?
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Most of the idle time on our team is from members who just don’t have anything to do. Sometimes because the stronger students just do the work without including the new people, or sometimes there is just downtime with no jobs available. Both require training sub-team captains to make sure the disengaged students actually have something to do, job shadow someone or have those random small tasks available.
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Consider adopting a tactic from The Old West. Have a board with many pockets at the door to your work space. “Check your phones here. Orders of the Robot Marshal”
T
Think of this as a failure of motivation rather than a failure of management. Successful teams have members who want to be productive.
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For phones, it’s pretty easy. We had an issue many years ago with phones… so we got a basket, put it by the door, and everyone dropped their phones in it for a year or two. That solved the immediate problem, and helped create an internal culture where being on your phone just isn’t a problem. We haven’t had the basket for maybe 10 years, and it’s still not a problem.
Horseplay simply isn’t tolerated. I’ve kicked people out of the shop for the night because of it. As mentioned previously, it’s a safety issue, so we’re pretty strict about that. That said, chit-chat and joking around can help keep things fun in the shop, so you have to be able to draw the line appropriately.
When it comes to keeping people focused and productive, that’s certainly a leadership challenge. You succeed when you can achieve the following:
- Give everyone a job
- Ensure everyone feels comfortable with their job and knows how to accomplish it, while also finding it engaging/challenging
- Ensure everyone feels ownership of their job, and of the project as a whole
These are ranked in order of difficulty.
The first is pretty easy - there’s always something that can be done (I’ve never heard a team complain about having too much time!), and if you do happen to run out of stuff to do, then you fix that with scheduling (how often you meet, which groups are meeting, etc).
The second can be trickier. It requires a team to really know and understand it’s training program. It requires team leadership to really know the team members, what they’re capable of. One of the best tricks to accomplishing this is pairing people up on projects. You may have a freshman who doesn’t know how to put together a gearbox, and a senior that can do it in their sleep. Assigning that job to either one of them individually is a bad idea - the freshman doesn’t know how to do it and the senior would rather b doing something more challenging. Having them work on it together, however, can be a great idea. The freshman gets to learn how to do it, while the senior gets to act a bit like a mentor, and gets the challenge of teaching it instead of just doing it.
The third is the hardest. Getting people to feel ownership of a project or task can be difficult. It means giving up some control, letting them be creative. It means letting them be a part of something (for example, a major mechanism) from prototype through assembly. You may have a freshman who has no idea how to design a robot, but by engaging with them in the design process, working with them on prototypes, asking their opinions and then taking the time to work out (with them!) the best solutions… you can get them to feel ownership over that mechanism. Extend that to the entire robot - helping pick the team strategy at the beginning of the season, helping decide the “big picture” design of the robot… these are all things that can help someone feel ownership of the project. And if you feel ownership of something, then you want it to succeed. And if you want it to succeed, you’re going to be more focused and driven when working!
Ultimately, work on some of these little things, and you’ll discover that you’re slowly creating a team culture where this stuff just isn’t an issue!
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That’s a great mechanism for getting people off their phones.
How did you all put practices like this in place in order to change the culture on your teams? Was the decision driven by the mentors or students? Did you announce that “from this day on…”? Who made the announcements?
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To get buy in from the students, we included some of the older, more experienced students in creating our team expectations. One of the products of that conversation was this list we call our “To Do List Order of Precedence” to help them know where to go next. We also said that a mentor can override this order and “short circuit” you further down the list if needed.
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Subteam work as directed by subteam mentor
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Consult subteam mentor for next assignment
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Housekeeping
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Consult mentor of subteam furthest behind schedule
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PR, business, and outreach tasks
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Game rules study
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Watch match videos for practice scouting or pre-scouting events
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Design iteration (even if we don’t use it, we have ideas for the future)
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Button making
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Philso
To be clear it has not been necessary to do this at the FRC level, I was just proposing a way you could address this if it is a problem on your team. Jon had a similar suggestion, I just tend to be a bit more theatrical about such things.
As I mentioned most of our current team of 26 came up through our farm system where this is just how it is. Our summer Robot School program for instance we send home notice to their parents before things start with our “media policy”. Few need to be reminded more than once. Repeated reminders certainly impact the probability of a student being invited to move up to the HS team as an 8th grader. If people are lackadasical in such matters they have usually wandered off in other directions when they hit 9th grade.
For the kids actually on the team, even those who joined as HS students they just look around and see how things are. We have less issue with phones than some. Our build space has horrible reception. Like bein’ in a faraday cage. There is some non team stuff happening on chromebooks and such but you have to pick your situations where intervention is needed.
Best of luck.
If you go with the Old West option have your most senior mentor announce the policy. If he or she is of my vintage the kids will likely assume they were actually there.
T
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I like a lot of the points made so far. I definitely agree that kids who are playing games on their phones are most often kids who want to work on robotics, but are new (don’t know what needs to be done/how to do it) and shy (afraid to ask). Keep in mind that if you ask someone to do something and they say they will, and then 10 min later you see them on their phone instead of doing it, 95% of the time it’s because they don’t know how to do it (even if they said they did). Some kids will strongly resist asking for help or admitting that they don’t know how to do something. I think we tend to see teenagers as approximately adults (especially when a few rock-star students influence our expectations), and forget that expecting 14 year olds in a new environment to find themselves a productive task and ask near-strangers for help with it is often not developmentally appropriate/realistic. When I see a kid on their phone instead of doing the task I gave them 5 minutes ago, I find it productive to think “they must not actually know how to do it, I better sit down with them and help them get started” rather than “grrr these lazy kids always screwing around, why don’t they care about the team”.
Over the past couple years we have worked on instilling in the captains a sense of responsibility for their teammates. Their #1 job is to engage, teach, and retain new members; getting work done comes second. We (the mentors) expect the captains to do a fair share of looking around the room, noticing people who need something to do or look stuck, and getting them going. We express this expectation during leadership job descriptions and interviews, and during our summer goal-setting sessions. Some of the captains get it right away and some struggle a little - it does take a bit of a leap of faith to focus on running a team instead of doing all the work yourself, and we will have conversations throughout the year with any captain who seems to be struggling with it. But overall the captains take this responsibility seriously, and between the captains and mentors we can find work for all the students at most meetings.
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