Hi everyone. I help run the robotics team at my school. This year, we had a large amount of people who wanted to join and only had resources for 5 teams. What ended up happening was that we put 10 people on each team, and the people who signed up earlier ended up on a team. What this led to was people who were on the teams had other commitments, and were gone most of the season. It wasted spots on teams and stopped others from having the opportunity since it was too late in the season.
This next school year, I would not like this to happen. I want the people on the teams to commit to this club, as lets be honest, it’s not an easy club/team. We have resources(currently) for 4 teams. Obviously we cannot do “tryouts” like sports teams, as we will have freshman and other newcomers. I need advice on how I should go about making teams next year. I would have people choose their own teams, but friends will choose their friends, and won’t get anything done(seen it from past experience), and I would like to balance the teams so we don’t have too many builders/programmers on one team. I’ve been thinking about solutions for a while but haven’t come up with anything. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, or even just how your school/organization did it.
I would recommend running fundraisers to see if you can get more parts or other materials. Another thing you might do, is put a 5 dollar entry fee for joint the club. People are more likely to come if they are financially committed. You could also get 100 plus dollars from a small fee that could be used to maybe register another team and/or buy more parts.
I would also highly recommend limiting teams to 6 people max. I find 2 as not enough to get everything done. 3 is good number but sometimes short on time. 4 has some people without a job sometimes.
I understand not being able to have tryouts but a simple application process shouldn’t be too bad. Since you have a limited number of slots available, let that be known and have the interested students submit applications.
There’s nothing exclusionary about applications that would differentiate this from any other extracurricular selection process.
Or one thing that he/she could do is have a robotics class that teaches all of the new members the basics without having them compete. Once they “graduate” out of that class then they can start competing.
That’s a good idea but it would require a lot of extra work on their part. In theory, it would be great, but it would reduce their already small budget by requiring extra instruction (I’m assuming from the mentor or facilitator). Just kinda inefficient given the resources the OP has.
We do have a robotics class, but it is the first year it has been up and most people took it for the extra credits they needed, not because they wanted to compete. I do like the idea though, I might talk to the teacher of the class.
but don’t have them “try out” while being able to freely communicate or they’ll all just kinda copy each other, give them a fake paper-and-pen exam with dividers on some robot basics with your commitment requirements and give them a lot of extra time to fiddle with the pens