I would appreciate specific referrals for particular teams with various team models among the full range of educational levels: JFLL, FLL, VEX, FTC, FRC.
What teams are primarily run by … ?
non-technical parent mentors
technical parent mentors
non-technical non-parent mentors
technical non-parent mentors
non-technical faculty advisor(s)
technical faculty advisors(s)
I fully agree with the mentor-student dynamic, but would like to explore the pros, cons and best practices for models in addition to the single faculty advisor model. Also, I would appreciate team leader recruiting, retention and transition ideas.
Our time is primarily student run. A couple of students are elected to handle more overarching affairs, primarily the overall leadership of the team, finances, project management, and communications within the time and between the team and sponsors. Then the individual subdivisions of the team have their own leader, usually the most qualified member of the division, which is responsible for the tasks assigned that group. The mentors act more in an advisory capacity, especially the two engineering teachers who sponsor us, particularly in the general running of the team. The other mentors provide insights here as well, but assist more in a technical capacity, giving advice on how to go about doing certain things.
But enough of this distraction. I have to finish Brave New World before morning. Yay for procrastination!
Our team is primarily student run. We have a “students only” policy for who can work on the robot. But we do have our faculty sponsor and several mentors standing by as resources. For team leadership, we elect a president, vice president, treasurer, safety captain, secretary, and historian.
For the robot, the leadership appoints the: device leader (manipulation), head of drivetrain, head of programming, head of electronics, the programming leader, and the integrator to tie all the robot systems together and ensure a high performance robot.
Wow - to properly address that question would take pages. As you seem to already know, there are many many different team models as there are teams. In this forum you will really only get the FRC and some FTC perspective.
We use a combination of technical mentors (no teachers, as we aren’t in a school), non-technical mentors, parents, and student leaders in a variety of roles. You can get an idea of our team structure in our handbook at
Tier 2: Mount Olive HS Robotics Engineering Teacher (Since '96) (Was Bill McGowan- recently retired) Now- Dave Bodmer (Since '09, former team 56 mentor)- Head Advisor, Ernie DiCicco(Since '97)- Parent of former student, Lead Technical Advisor, Engineer
Teir 3: Technical Parents and Engineers. Referred to as the Adult Core Engineering Team (ACET). One or two ACET mentors per Subgroup as leaders.
Tier 4: Main team captains (2-4) + Head student of each subgroup = SCET- Student Core Engineering Team
Tier 5: Subteams: each with 1 SCET Leader and 1 or 2 ACET Leader
FTC/VRC:
Tier 1: (Tiers 1 and 2 of FRC)
Tier 2: 2 Juniors as student mentors
Tier 3: Sophomore- 1 sophomore captain of each FTC/VRC team comprised of freshman and sophomores. Substituted leaders at the Middle School teams.
FLL:
Tier 1: (Tiers 1 and 2 of FRC- Ernie DiCicco is the head of FLL for NJ) + District wide for elementary schools and Middle School
Hope that helps with planning, and remember that this is just the structure of our specific team.
At our school the management for the levels we have, usually can change. This happens more for the younger levels that are based on parent support as well as faculty support.
For us our JFLL team i think is currently looking for a new mentor, but before that the team was led by a fairly technical husband-wife couple, who had a child on the team, and the husband is a faculty member.
FLL is now going to be run by them along with a technical mentor who is an alumni of our school, in the past FLL has been run by technical parent-mentors.
We don’t have FTC, but we do have VEX. FRC and VEX is run mostly student based with FRC having management help from a technical alumni mentor. Our faculty advisor helps us in relations with the school, our finances, and other administrative things but does not help with the building of the robot.
I think the main thing i see is that for younger teams sometimes finding faculty is hard. There usually is some parent, mentor, or a faculty member who can help, and they are usually very very good for that program.
The older programs can be run with much less help on the faculty/parent part, however sometimes they are still very helpful to get new teams off the ground
FRC: The students do most of the work, and the head coach keeps the team organized. The mentors add advice and suggestions when we are talking about robot design, they answer questions that sub-team leaders cant answer, and they assist sub-team leaders when they need help.
1676 also mentors 4 FLL teams in 4 different middle schools. With FLL, there is one teacher at the middle school who helps, and two pioneers rotate each day of a school-week to go to a middle school to help out the FLL teams.
