So right now my team is in kind of a dilemma. The problem is that my team has four people that can drive and all of us are good at it. What I would like to do is to create two drive teams and let both teams drive equally until finals(in which we let the better performing drive team drive). Instead, my team wants to do a driving competition and the best drivers get paired up. This might not work because some of the drivers absolutely can’t work together unless we want our robot to be in a wall. Also, most of our drivers are pretty confident in their skills and will kill someone if they don’t drive. To solve this, they said that once we reach 1st/2nd place(or just a high place), the “secondary team” can drive. There are two problems with this:
Some people can’t work together as well.
Low chance that we will place insanely high at our first competition
Also, the reason they are doing this(actually two people that are very stubborn with this mindset) is that they want to win. They said to me, “We are going to win, and having fun is secondary to winning.”(they said a bunch of other stuff that just states “fun and learning isn’t important, it’s winning”) FIrst of all, 2 others and me disagree with this plan, but they won’t change. Second of all(in my opinion), learning and having fun is more important than winning and not having fun. My question is, how do I convince them to change?
Explain that winning is not your #1 goal, but also explain that your chance of winning diminishes significantly if you don’t work together. Teamwork is important to succeed. The teams that win worlds are usually 6-8 people teams, and they got there (among other reasons) because they work together extremely well. But also about your driving problem, explain that driver is a role on the team. This works well in V5, but the theory also applies in IQ. If you don’t glorify driving, people won’t fight over driving. Someone has to drive, and it’s an important role, but no more important than building or programming. (See How *Not* To Run a Team | Purdue SIGBots Wiki) While your perspective on making sure that everyone gets to drive may be “fairer” on paper, I feel like what some other team members suggested with “driver tryouts” might work better if you have 2 dedicated drivers and a loader (although they could also gave other roles on the team), then they can get the most practice driving the robot. I understand that some team members may be upset about not being chosen to drive, so if you do use the method that I suggested, I would recommend having a talk with the team why you made this decision, and that driving is no more of an important role than building or programming, or even notebooking. Notebooking and programming can both win you a competititon, or at least skills (programming more so in V5RC, but it still stands in IQ), and without builders, nothing would work (because you didn’t have a robot). I hope this helps!
The team will jump me for saying winning is not my #1 goal(I tried that yesterday).
We have a 5 member team, and in my opinion, less members means more work for each member. That allows me to focus on the thing i’m working on without people asking me for work(that still happens a lot).
My team thinks that basically driving is the best part of robotics(also feels good to be the 2 people that scored the final points to win finals). I never tried glorifying driving, but everyone on the team(apart from one person) felt how good it feels to drive and all think that they can drive better than everyone else.
I understand your point, but the problem right now is that the “best drivers” may not work as well together, and if i’m one of them, I can’t really attend all competitions.
They probably won’t be just upset. From what I know, most of them won’t be content with not driving. They MIGHT start complaining more or argue for 5 minutes about this(yes it happened before). Right now, one of them are suggesting that I don’t tryout, and that I only can be a secondary driver no matter how good I am(I understand that it’s less competition, but just because I can’t go to EVERY competition doesn’t mean that I should be left out).
They talk over me. If one of the two people that talk a lot disagree with something I said, they will start talking over me without letting me finish.
I do both the programming and notebooking for my team(2 hours off my sleep time for notebooking ). Everyone builds on my team.
They want Teamwork Champion and Excellence mainly. Skills Champion isn’t as important to them.
). Everyone builds on my team.