My team right now is trying to get all the kinks hammered out with our leadership setup and rules. We are a rookie team that found out we are a team in December, so we didn’t have time to get a very structered rules set.
My question is this, do the teams out there have a written down set of rules or is it more implied guidlines? If you do have rules, what is the discipline for those who break them? If you do not have rules, how do you maintian order?
We have a handbook that our steering committee developed. This consists of behavioral rules, along with other rules, such as required participation.
We use the same system that FIRST has implemented this year (slightly modified). A student can receive a Yellow Card for bad behavior (can be received by any adult mentor, even if the student is not in their group.) The student must wear this Yellow Card (It clips on to their shirt) every time they come to robotics for the rest of the build season. They are allowed 2 Yellow Cards. After that, the third Yellow Card turns into a Red Card, which means suspension/removal from the team, depending on circumstances.
The handbook also outlines participation requirements, such as # Build Season Hours, # of Dollars, # of Community Service Hours, # of Group Fundraising Hours, # of Entries into Patron Book, etc. Check out Penfield Rolling Thunder’s website; This is what we modeled our team after. They have all of their material available online (I think…)
If you have more questions as to how our team operations, feel free to ask.
It defines costs, fundraising, student involvement requirements, school grades, time committments, travel, etc…
I’m not sure what type of “rules” you are looking for exactly, but if our students do not maintain their school grades, or put in the required time for the team, and other various things that are required, they don’t get to travel to competitions. As for other discipline matters, it’s case by case, but we don’t typically have any major issues.
We have team rules, though we don’t exactly have a “list” (except for travel rules, which are pretty straightforward and are given to us before the competition season). In general, students are just expected to be on their best behavior and remember that they are representing the team.
A new “three strikes” rule was implemented this year to enforce discipline. If a student has three discipline issues, he or she can be restricted from traveling. Thankfully, nobody was subject to this rule this year. Everyone represented the team very well during both the build season and at competitions.
The biggest thing that our team does to enforce discipline is to hold interviews each year. On the way back from Atlanta, the whole team is disbanded (with the exception of our end of the year banquet in May). Every student must reapply, and if they have had discipline issues or haven’t done their share of the work, they might not make the team again. Now, this may seem hard on some students, but they are allowed to re-interview later in the year and show if they are ready to be a member of the team again. This system has worked very well for us.
It covers a number of topics such as team organization, travel guidelines, and grade requirements. It also has a full year calender that demonstrates our pre-season and build-season schedules, as well as copies of student forms used by the school.
Here is team 25’s manual. I know the date on that is 2004, but the only major updates have been to add a section about our animation team. Everything else is more or less the same.
Martin, when does your team reassemble to hold interviews? Is it the next year or after competition? It sounds like a good idea but I’d like to know some more details so I have the most options available.
If anybody on the team gets a referal for breaking your schools honor code, i.e. cheating, lying or stealing, do you remove them from the team? I know that the honor societies at Westfield do that so I was wondering what everybody else does. It is not a problem and I hope it does not become one, I’m just trying to get the team a solid foundation for future years.
Another Idea I am thinking of I am inspired by my boy scout troop. If you are suspended or expelled from school, the example I was given was for drug use but its not limited to that, then you must sit down with the comitee and say why you should be allowed in the troop.
It sounds alot like what Martin was talking about but without having to interview the whole team, just those who are a problem.
Thanks for all the posts and help, I’ll let you know when we get a solid rule set down,
We use a Team Constitution that has been in effect for this season. It was created in order to have more autonomy within the school’s chain of command. So far it has been invoked once to remove a student.
We have a simple set of unwritten rules that people just sort of pick up on in the pre-season. Mostly it is simple common sense as opposed to any very specific or strict rules. When it comes to behavior you simply act with respect towards everyone on the team and everyone else we happen to meet with in the course of the season, and that basically covers all the bases. When it comes to safety we have the simple safety glasses when operating the tools in our machine shop, and make sure you keep the point bits pointed away from you. We also have a set of guidelines and releases we had to sign at the beginning of the year.
However we have had to create one very specific rule. Don’t put sprockets in an empty pizza box and then throw it into the garbage. Something we learned from experience. :rolleyes:
They are a support group and information exchange for adults running teams. They have lots of good stuff there.
Remember that your rules and handbooks are always a work in progress. The best thing that you can do is get something out there and keep refining it. Don’t wait until you feel it is done. It will never be done.
This is to explain what Ben was talking about a little more:
We do disband the team on the ride back from Atlanta. It has become a sort of ritual that has been done for the last three or four years. All students must reapply with a resume and interview with teachers and engineers. To make interviews go faster we schedule two groups of interview teams and the students spend 15 minutes with one then switch and spend 5 with the other. Students are rated on performance by all the engineers and teachers and we go over that rating with the student from that year and let the student tell us why they should be on the team. All the students know that they have to build their resume through the year so they push to do things like car washes, demos, Lego mentoring, Vex Mentoring, learn how to operate different machines or software, and so on. This has worked for us but I know there are teams that don’t like this type of structure and that is fine.
Same thing happened to our team, we barley had enough time to go over the details of what is FIRST and how everything works and what we should do.
Even after the competition, when we had a major reduce in participation of students, we’re not entirly sure about everything of what we should do next year(but we’re working on it).
We didn’t have rules in this year’s season and we tried to come up with some “schedule” of work. It might have worked for the first weeks, but in the middle it started to prove wrong and lots of student participation was missing. Allot of days when we needed one preson from a sub team to assist another, he wasn’t there because he left before for he was told he had nothing to do(who told him?) and the next time he would appear would be only a few more days.
It was very messy and there were people responsible for activity and sometimes it was because they didn’t know what to do since we haven’t had a lot of time to learn our roles and didn’t have time in the building process to go over the rules.
I think the only way to maintain order without rules is to find those who want to be a big part of this project and try to set dates for them to participate.
In my opinion. The whole team should be available almost all day. Of course, it’s sometimes imposible, but I think that there should be maximum participation for a successful building process.
I’ve been nailed in the last seconed the position of the team leader and I’ve spoken before with my team and I asked them what THEY think are the team goals, and they told me that they have some ideas but it’s my job to ditermine and apply them to the rest of the team.
I’ve had my own problems trying to lead the programming sub-team, but it came out more or less fine and I’m afraid I won’t be able to do better as a leader of the whole team.
While reading other teams handbooks, I find very interesting stuff that I would like to share with my team.
Chris, if you figure out something interesting about team mangement I’d like to know about it too, so I’m hoping we can keep in touch about these stuff.
I have one question from all this and it is how do I make people participate?
As a general thing to keep in mind, there are some amazing team handbooks out there, I’ve read a lot of them, but make sure to absorb all of this information and then apply it to your team specifically. You may want to hold a meeting with your whole team to see what went wrong, what went right, what needs to change, and how you are going to go about doing it. After this list has been compiled, draft a list of of general team rules, preferably into various sections. Make it easy to read so that students won’t get confused about the difference between what is acceptable at school(or wherever you work), and what is acceptable when traveling or at competition.
Then you can compare your unique guidelines to an already existing handbook to see if you have left out or want to change something. Whats most important is that this fits your team. If you have any new policies that you would like to set forth, this would be a great time to introduce them. Good luck with creating a set of rules of your own.
To list a few major rules:
No Cussing. (Especially at the Competitions where there are many people watching including Judges!) Punishment - Member(s) should not be allowed to attend an event until they have learned their lesson. Repeated Offenses will not be tolerated.
No Cutting Classes. Punishment - Off the Team for 2 Weeks. Repeated Offenses will not be tolerated.
Not Allowed to Fail Classes. Punishment - Off the Team for a Marking Period or More.
Team Setup should be broken down into committees or sub-divisions with one person in charge of each or as needed. The Biggest Sub-Divisions are Team Leadership as a whole, Sponsorship and Fundraising (Which should be one committee), Pit Crew, Safety, Scouting, Drive Team, Build Team, Team Costumes, Graphics, Give Aways & Spirit (Which should also be one committee).
