Does anyone have any ideas on the best number of people to have on a team? Right now we have 2, but are planning on moving that up to 4 next year. 2 wasn’t enough to do everything we wanted, but we still did pretty well. Any input from teams with 4-6 members? Is there enough work to go around?
Ideal is 4 , not so much that ppl get distracted cuz only 2 can build at a time normally
I would say 2-3. If you have 2 good productive members, you only need 3 people.
This year we had between 2-5 and with more than 3 there were too many idol students.
Next year we will focus more on 2-3. I know some teams are highly functioning with way more than that, but for us the big teams don’t work.
We have 7 and find it a very good number. Many of the students on our team have jobs and play sports so when we meet it usually consists of around 5-6 students. It really depends on where and how often you meet. I don’t believe there is a max number of students.
Our team this year had a total of 8 members, and though I’m biased because I’m the one who chose to have so many members, I feel like it worked out pretty well. Almost all of my members were in sports besides robotics, so most weekly meetings didn’t have full attendance anyways. At the typical meeting, we would have around 4-5 members, 2 of whom would be working on the robot, 1 of whom would be working on documentation, and the remaining members working on things like scouting, prototyping, etc. We did have meetings where all 8 members were present; at these meetings, I assigned small-scale challenges that would be useful for the robot yet didn’t require actually working on it. Some examples:
- Tension release mechanism
- iPod-style (ring with center button) user input for robot
- Sensor-based hang alignment
Overall, I think large teams aren’t necessarily at a disadvantage, as long as each of the members really wants to be on the team and is willing to put in effort wherever they’re assigned.
the last two years I have had 8+ people on my team and I end up doing all of the work still, it really is just a matter of dedication to the club. I am happy to say im doing a one man team next year.
It really depends on the goals of the team in general. For example, as a first year team, we wanted to get as much done as possible so we had about 8 members. 1 captain, 3 builders, 2 programmers, 2 outreach/finance/online challenges coordinators. However, if you know that your team members don’t work well in groups, I would decrease number of builder and outreach coordinators just so they don’t get off topic all the time.
We had 8 members our first year. There were 4 members that did stuff. The other 4 distracted us and overall made the team worse. When we split to two different teams, they did great, but when you have nothing to do, you are generally a determent to the team.
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The more members you have you need to have a better and better head coach to control everything. If the head coach is not good at keeping people on task have a small team of your coach can keep people on task you can have a bigger team which I think is better because then you can have dedicated scouters at tournaments
yes… we get questioned about this at every competition by every judge which we find very funny. Our team is 8 years old and our rookie season we had five members but since is has always been 4, 6, or 7.
We had 4 members on our team and it was fine. Later in the season, another team merged with our team, making us have a grand total of 10 members on our team. Out of the 10 members only 5 were productive. The rest either didn’t come to meetings or they came for 5 minutes then ordered pizza and left. Then sometimes the unproductive ones had the nerve of criticizing parts of the robot. I find that having a small amount of people working on the bot is best because there is less arguing and more work gets done. During States, the original members came to my house and improved the lift of our robot (Swiss-cheesing, Reducing friction). The next day, the lift was able to do 2 cubes and 3 stars all at once. So, I’m an advocate for the smaller team.
Yeah… Our head mentor doesn’t really do much…
I think 4 people for your team should be good. Our team had 7 members, and that didn’t turn out so good.
Personal Experience:
I started this season with 12 members. 1 Captain/2ViceCaptains(One did build other did Programming)/1PR/1Notebook/1Prog/7odd builders and miscellaneous task-doers. One person quit in December having nothing to do. Others showed up intermittently, not being there enough to learn how to design a robot but Often enough to know what parts are called and build basic elements of a robot. If I could have a smaller team it would be 5-7 people. 1Cpt/1Vcpt/1Prog/1NB/2Builder
The past three years multiple teams from my school ran 1 person teams, with me being one of them.
I have had teams of 5-7 team members. 4-6 is ideal. At practices, with 6 dedicated team members, we haven’t had issues of students not having jobs. There is almost always something to do, even if it is the journal, programming, packing and organizing parts, building spares, etc. You can’t have the whole team working on the robot at once, but there is no need. With a full year of building and rebuilding, everyone will get plenty of time with their hands on the robot. At competitions, you can have 3 drive team members and 1-3 scouting. I have seen very successful teams with more members (2019F) and very successful teams with less members (60X). As long as ALL team members are willing to work hard, I think the number of team members won’t affect at team’s success.
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What does that mean?