Winnowing down numbers for a 4th Grade Team / Introductory letter

We are forming a 4th grade team. We will have many kids who want to join, but only 20 spots available. Anyone have suggestions for how to limit our numbers?

Also, as I’m making the initial flyer to send home with the kids, I wish I could see some examples from other clubs. If you have one, would you post a copy of it?

Thanks very much!

I don’t have a flyer, but for the teams I would suggest no more than 4 kids per team. Look for divisible interest in mechanical, programming, lab notebook and STEM. One student leading each, with the others involved as they need to be, being sure you will find two lead drivers out of those four kids.

I saw some of the answers on the vex forum. We never went by grades or test scores or anything like that, we just had friends who heard by word of mouth and grew from one team to four over as many years.

Thanks for the response! I like the idea of focusing one kid on each subject. I’m definitely going to try that.

This is a public school, and we got some funding from the district, so we need to open the initial offer to as many 4th graders at our school. Looking for a more transparent way to weed through kids. I’m not in favor of using grades either. I want to catch some of the kids who are struggling with the regular curriculum. I’d also like it to be 50% girls. I want to catch some economically disadvantaged kids too, so a required fee would make that difficult.
Pretty sure we will not please everyone, and there will be some ruffled feathers.
Thanks again.

I’d suggest getting the letters of interest back and drawing them out of a (box/hat/container) and take the roboteers that way. I’ve been doing VEX for over 10 years and my biggest successes are not the thousand plus roboteers, it’s the dozen that lives were changed because of robotics. It would be sad if you missed one of them.

You can always contact the other parents and say “sorry, limited resources, but kits are $350 and events will be another $250, group up with some other families and start your own teams.”

I’d let them know there is a commitment, especially if it is outside school hours. If you can let them know the times and/or dates of competitions, etc. Interference with other activities may help weed out a few.

Great ideas so far! I had over 80 students wanting 50 spots this year. I upped it to 60 but I still had to make the terrible “Thank you for your interest…but” letters. Our members pay a $55 fee, had to fill out student responses, and parents had to do an online application. Students also had to attend a small group interview. It only lasted for about 15 minutes but I had them tell me about why they wanted to be in robotics, what they would do if their team disagreed, and then they solved a simple challenge so I could observe group work. You can check out our website for wording on the information I gave to parents. I hope this helps!

We had our opening meeting today. Ours are paying a $125 fee, 2 scholarships available. The activity definitely showed me who could work as a team member. Wish I would have put nametags on the kids because everything ran together after awhile. I did take some video though, so I can reference that. Thanks for all your suggestions!