Hi, for year I coach teams in several robotic competitions (FLL, FRC, VRC, and VIC). for last 3 years I focus on VEX. My teams became Turkey Champions in VRC the first year, next year we won in VIC elementary. At school there is a lot of applicant every year. Too much for us. This year we add 3 new teams but it’ very difficult to manage so much kid and so different robots. Our main problem is there is too much student per team, and with the season going some of the student are frustated not to drive during official turnament.
I am sure this problem of organisation occur to other team. How did you manage it?
Most teams in the United States only have 1 driver; most students simply don’t drive. This is usually whoever on the team shows the best driving ability. I remember my first year, the coach had everyone drive through an obstacle course, and the fastest driver on a team would get to drive for the whole season.
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Any more than 6 students per team is just too many, I’d say 5 is ideal.
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We do teams of four, and let the roboteers decide who drives. Some teams it’s one or two { VRC } some they all drive. VEXIQ needs two drivers per match, so it’s easier to have everybody drive.
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This is for IQ. Still, teams of 3 or 4 are ideal. Start with 4 and some of them will wittle down to three.
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it says IQ for category, but OP didnt specifically say new IQ teams, and the IQ category is the first one.
For IQ, I think 4 is optimal and all should be practicing driving, because you never know when you’ll only have 2 at a tournament.
For EDR I’d try to provide everyone who wants to drive opportunity to practice driving. At regular intervals, maybe shortly before each tournament, have a driving competition to determine who the best is. (Record these in the EN!)
To me, it sounds like you are spreading yourself way too thin. I can’t imagine trying to balance all 4 of those programs. I would try to simplify as the there seems to be a bit of redundancy. Why do both VEX IQ and FLL? With a lot of kids wanting to get involved with the robot why do both FRV and VRC? To me, although I think that FRC is a valuable program, I think I get more kids involved with a robot in VRC as I can field 5-7 teams of 3-5 each instead of 1 team in FRC of 20-35 kids for less money.
He’s the national coordinator of robotics in Turkey (https://twitter.com/dvdsgn) which sounds like a cool job. So he’s the all robotics for all students guy there. I’m going to guess that he’s got a wide base of needs and is trying to fill them all.
- FLL makes sense if you have other mentors/roboteers that have a ton of Lego parts to build things. FLL students like to program and the research presentation strikes a chord in some people
- FRC is (in my mind) the next level past VRC for HS students. The robots can be much more complex, they are much bigger / heavier. I’ve had roboteers that where meh on VRC, but given a chance to machine robot parts on a CNC, they were all in.
We all make choices on what we think is best, but I’m happy to have MOE-365 a Delaware FRC team to send roboteers to.
But I do VEX because that’s the biggest bang for my mission. Other missions are different.
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I think it should be made clear that joining a team doesn’t mean you get to drive; that’s not unique to VEX or even robotics. Also, if you have committed members who are organized then large teams work.
By the sounds of it, your setup is not too different from what we have for the Pilons (5225). The parent organization (E-Bots Robotics) runs summer and after-school classes for young kids, multiple FLL teams, and the VEX team. Students progress through the program in that order, so anyone who makes it to VEX (by invitation) understands the commitment required. This year I believe the VEX team has 14 members (all as one team!), which enables them to spread out and be more productive; for any one area of the team (i.e. build, programming, etc) there are multiple people working on it, and junior members are able to learn from their more experienced team members so that they can take over in the future.
In summary, it all comes down to enforcing some level of organization for the program as a whole.
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Thank you for the clarification. That is an immense task. And I think there are great aspects to all of the programs, FLL, VEX IQ, VRC and FRC. For our system, VEX IQ and VRC makes the most sense.
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Hi, sorry my english is far from perfect and I was not clear enough. I used to coach in FIRST oriented teams, But for 3 year i am nearly 100% VEX. The IQ level is new for me. It’s why I ask member management tips. This season in 2 of 5teams there is a lot of frustation among student who were cover drivers… In one hand we want performance, in the other fullfill every student with satisfaction. A difficult equation for me.
Thank a lot to all your precious advices.
As others have said, for IQ a team size of 4 is ideal. This allows you to pair up drivers and in tournaments each driver pairs can have a good amount of driving attempts between teamwork matches and driver skills matches. Plus, with 4 everyone can be involved in other aspects like programming, designing/building, notebook, etc.
Hello David
I am TIC of VEX and VEX IQ at my school. At IQ level I have about 20-30 students and I like to make teams between 3-5 students. team management can be difficult, but I like students to choose teams as much as possible. One of my top teams without being told, circulated drivers among themselves, even though I could clearly see some were better drivers. One of the many reasons I love VEX and IQ as it allows students to learn communication, collaboration and cooperation. People skills are as important as technical skills
We do teams of four, and let the roboteers decide who drives. Some teams it’s one or two { VRC } some they all drive. VEXIQ needs two drivers per match, so it’s easier to have everybody drive.
I think 3 students in a team is the best choice. One driver, one bulider, and one programmer.
Just like us, 3 members in our team.
I would say anything between 2-4 is ideal. a generally, only 2 people can work on the bot, and 1 person can program. The extra person can journal or just help out in general.
If you have too many people, only a small amount of people can work and most people will just slack off and do nothing. If you have problems like that, one solution is to build 2 bots so you can have more people work on the bot at once
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Having multiple drivers isn’t really a thing, it’s often best to just stick to one. but one possible solution to alleviate the problem is to go dual driver to at least double the amount of people that can drive but communication becomes more important so it’s kind of a win lose…
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Hi dear Mentors, many thanks for sharing your practices. This season for team 34000 we decide to go for 4 teams member due to your kind advices. Doing it the every student will have multiple task (for example : Designer/Coder - Designer/Builder, Driver/Coder, Driver/Builder), but every task need to be doable by all, so every one will participate to design, building, coding, and driving meeting.