How many hours a week?

[rkniffin]

Last year was our first. We typically met Sunday afternoons for 2-3 hours. Closer to the tournament, we met a couple times a week. We are talking about adding a second meeting during the week, but not sure yet.

There is a practice tournament in our area in November. You should check it out. They do a nice job organizing the event. Their website is http://www.frc272.com/.

Rich
Lego Works

[jpgore]

Originally Posted by bob_irving

Thanks so much for the thoughtful reply. You've nailed the issues.

We can usually get everyone at most meetings. We have large groups (max=10). And yes, setup and breakdown time cuts into productivity. And my own stamina at the end of the day is usually waning! I was finding 2x a week taxing.

I appreciate your ideas. Let's see if anyone else chimes in.

Do you find that 2 hours a week gives you enough time to do the project, robot builds, etc.? When is your tournament?

Interesting discussion... We usually do 1x 4hour session a week, but do 2x per week for a couple of weeks before a tournament. It seems we're all doing about similar.

[someonewhobikes]

We're an elementary school program; we meet for 90 minutes after school two days a week. The kids come in to the robot room (we're lucky; the school has a spare room they give us, so the only setup is unlocking the cabinet with the robots & wheeling the laptop lab down from the computer room) and have a snack to provide a bit of a break. We also meet for 5 hours on Saturday; while that session is optional almost every kid attends every week, except for conflicts with other activities.

We find that Saturdays tend to be more productive, although they do make progress during the week. We have a scheduled run-around-the-gym session before lunch to let them blow off some steam.

Our first year we met every day after school two weeks before a tournament. This wasn't helpful; the kids got too burned out. So last year we cut that back to just the week before.

After FLL season we do LEGO sumo; we meet 2 days after school but not on Saturdays. We had some burnout issues this year, so next year we're going to take a few weeks off between FLL & sumo.

[Tom Mosher]

Originally Posted by someonewhobikes

We're an elementary school program; we meet for 90 minutes after school two days a week. The kids come in to the robot room (we're lucky; the school has a spare room they give us, so the only setup is unlocking the cabinet with the robots & wheeling the laptop lab down from the computer room) and have a snack to provide a bit of a break. We also meet for 5 hours on Saturday; while that session is optional almost every kid attends every week, except for conflicts with other activities.

We find that Saturdays tend to be more productive, although they do make progress during the week. We have a scheduled run-around-the-gym session before lunch to let them blow off some steam.

Our first year we met every day after school two weeks before a tournament. This wasn't helpful; the kids got too burned out. So last year we cut that back to just the week before.

After FLL season we do LEGO sumo; we meet 2 days after school but not on Saturdays. We had some burnout issues this year, so next year we're going to take a few weeks off between FLL & sumo.

That's a pretty heavy schedule.

[someonewhobikes]

Originally Posted by Tom Mosher

That's a pretty heavy schedule.

Yeah, especially for the coaches. There are two main reasons:
* We don't meet at all during the summer. A few of the kids on our team attend NXT programming classes that our FRC team sponsors but for the most part the only off-season work that gets done is by those who have their own Mindstorms sets.
* Our school-based and -sponsored program is only composed of 5th & 6th graders, so 1/2 of our 2 teams' kids are new every year. We don't have to work with the 6th graders as much, but the 5th graders do need more instruction. And so far we've had very few 6th graders that are of much help mentoring the younger kids; that should change this year as we have several pretty mature kids coming back (including one that mentored as a 5th grader last year.

The minor reason is that we were new teams with new coaches 2 years ago & didn't really know better; we modified a lot of things last year and have a number of changes we'll make this year. But we're going to keep this schedule; we have a short season with no opportunities for "formal" informal tournaments.