Our club is soon to grow. However, do you guys have any tips on how to include everyone in working a robot when let us say there are 15 people on one robot?
Sounds like complete overkill.
A competitive and collaborative VEX team may only have about 5 people assuming that every member is committed. Your best bet would be to split the club into 3 teams consisting of 5 students each, maximizing their potential.
Ideal Roles:
Driver
Programmer
Notebook
CAD
Coach
Scout
Normally each member contributes a small amount to each of these categories with drive team roles being permanent.
If money is the issue, VEX provides grants for each team registered which consists of the required materials to build a simple functioning robot.
Since Toss Up, the largest rookie team I have seen consisted of around the same number of people, and that lead to a very poor outcome.
If team splitting isn’t within the idea of your club, you may want to consider FIRST, however I’m not so sure how much I can elaborate on that within this forum without gaining any criticism.
Good Luck!
I partially agree with this. There’s not much of a way for 15 people to turn out well (in VRC). However, a good base number for VRC in my experience is 7-8. This said, the OP is a VexU team. Assuming a few of the 15 are not 100% committed, this may be a good number still. You could probably assign a few more people to most roles because you have 2 robots to manage. There is more building, programming, and notebook writing to do with 2 robots. IMO the ideal roles in a 15 person VexU team would be:
Driver x3
Programmer x3
Notebook x3
CAD x3
Dedicated Builders x3
Everyone else also can build
Competition Duties
Drivers+drive coaches x6
Scouts x6 (go in small groups)
Extras x3
In addition to normal duties
We have teams of 3-4, with 1st and 2nd year students on the support team. Support team has been 10-12 the last 2 years. Those students compete in SkillsUSA, a much smaller competition, and are our pit crew and scout team on game days. Allows me to identify the future team captains.
A nearby school does a varsity and JV level. Large teams build 2 robots. Varsity team comprises drive team and maybe 1 or 2 more. JV team is mentored by varsity and competes in one event where all team members switch roles.
Combine notebook and cad with coach
You mentioned a grant from vex, do you have any more info about that?
team and other grants
Team Grants
How BLRS splits our members up
Mechanics team. Split into 2 teams. One per Vex U robot.
Software teams for programming
Electronics team for custom electronics
Pros development team.
All these have helped to get our many members active in the club as well as utilizing their strengths.
As our members are still increasing we are intoducting a new member team this year where we can train future members while they learns as well as intoducting a strategy team this year where members will help to find the most effective designs. Auto routines, working on the engineering notebooks and 3D printing components.
Maybe this is because I come from a team of 4, but other than having a dedicated driver, I don’t see the benefits of assigning roles to people. We have always worked better when everyone works what they want to work on, and not what somebody is telling them to do. It’s fine to have people who are more skilled in one area than another, but I would avoid assigning roles outright, especially if you can have a smaller team size. I can understand how 15 people might get hectic though.