I am starting a team this year and have a rather large group of students that have expressed interest in participating. I am asking for any advice on how to manage the large team.
I am thinking that I will have approximately 2 HS teams (VRC), 3 MS Teams (VRC), and 1 or 2 MS IQ Teams. I believe that I will have plenty of numbers to support this, and likely too many. However, I understand that there can be too many hands in the cookie jar and that can lead to problems. However I don’t believe that I would have enough supplies for much more than the breakdown above. How have other coaches narrowed down their bulk group of participants to a select number of teams?
How many people were you thinking per team?
The way we chose was the coach asked for applications, then whittled down those, then invited the rest to interviews, and picked from that.
Good luck!
I’m thinking about 3-5 students per team, but this is more based on my experience with classroom robotics rather than competition teams because this is our first year in VEX Comps.
I guess the situation that I foresee is having 5 different MS groups (just an example) that all want to compete in VRC, but I only have enough resources for the 3 that I mentioned. How have coaches dealt with telling 2 possible teams that they are not going to compete? What process have different coaches used?
I’m a little confused, do you already have teams?
You will just have to tell some people that they cannot participate.
As long as you are open to the students they will understand
This may be the most crucial advice I can give, through my 8 years of doing robotics…
My two cents:
School is priority.
When it comes to robotics, that can be learned throughout their entire time in school. If a student needs to omit robotics for grades/classes, or even just needs a break, that is perfectly healthy and preferred. This long-term wise can improve motivation for students by giving the student body a choice and therefore would end up finding passion naturally in robotics through a consentual push pull into STEM.
Teaching in the classroom: Computer Science - Abstract Concepts and Ideas Pertaining to Robotics
You can create a library of resources that teaches students how to learn advanced topics like odometry (particularly based on 5225A’s arc-based odometry paper), pure pursuit, PID, etc. Additionally, there are a plethora of PROS and VEXCode libraries that can help guide students to learn such advanced concepts. For example, LemLib for PROS, or Jar Template for VEXCode
Teaching in the classroom: Mechanical Engineering - Learning the Concepts
There are plenty of resources available on build quality and designs, alongside helpful resources on building a robot at: https://wiki.purduesigbots.com/.
Teaching in the classroom: Documentation - Understanding the Rubric
There is a rubric for the Engineering Design Notebook, which can be found here: https://kb.roboticseducation.org/hc/en-us/articles/4461349729047-Judging-Resource-Engineering-Notebook-Rubric
This rubric allows not only the students to understand what is expected of the judges, but it allows you to help students with shortfalls in the engineering notebook they are developing. Traditionally, judges love to see drawings, advanced topics, passion, and innovation. Quality of the work is often better than the quantity of it. The main idea is that any individual with zero knowledge can understand the engineering notebook. And something like that can be confusing to students who may just want to jump into the action. Instead of having a negative response to these type of students, you can have a positive response by doing something like ice cream parties for every milestone reached in the engineering notebook. You can have like a “hall of fame” to the teams that display the most professionalism for the season. You can find a good example of an engineering notebook here: BLRS2 '23-'24 Engineering Notebook | Purdue SIGBots Wiki
Students should be able to try different roles and see what works with them, switch between them etc. The goal is to turn robotics into a passion and make it fun. Constructive criticism should be supported, and there may be disagreements at times. When there’s a disagreement, you can consider resolution protocols like a weighted pro/con or something of the sort (applying weights to pros and weights to cons and then compare the total weight of the pros and cons of a particular category).
I hope this information is informative and helpful for your endeavors as a coah! With enough funding, and how much you wish to apply this knowledge, nothing is impossible.
Make sure there are, at least, a couple of HS students responsible for mentoring MS teams. This extra responsibility will both help them grow and offload some workload from you.
Also, visit some early local competitions with more motivated of your students even before your robots are ready as spectators or volunteers. This should help you tremendously as the first year competitors.
Lastly, ask some more experienced school programs or clubs in your area if they are willing to give your students a Getting Started with Vex workshop. Those tips and tricks are priceless and will save you a metric ton of time.