<p>Hey CC,</p>
<p>Well I'm a sophomore and next year I will be captain of the Robotics club. Last year, at my old school, we competed in the FRC. We used the basic steel chassis. We had no machine shop.</p>
<p>At my new school, they have been doing the FTC for the past couple years. Before that, they did do FRC for a long time. But the teacher made everyone donate about 5 hours a day on weekdays and 12 hours a day on weekends. People just quit.</p>
<p>Next year, I want to restart the FRC at my school. I plan on trying to keep the workload to about 10 hours a week. Is it possible to finish like this? We will use the basic chassis and a lot of PVC parts. Any advice? Also, how do I gain <em>more devoted</em> members?</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>The team at my school put in probably around the same hours (4 hours a day on weekdays, ~20-25 hours on the weekends) and we still had a lot to do at competition. But my team is very small and we didn't want to rely too much on our mentors... so I guess if you have a lot more experienced people you could cut back on the time. Or, of course, you could just go get a lot of mentors and make them do everything, but this is usually frowned upon and you don't get much out of FIRST. </p>
<p>I don't quite understand the bit about the teacher making everybody come for that much time though. Are the students actually doing stuff (designing, building, wiring, programming) during all those times? Because if they aren't then many get bored. Did you ask around to see why they all left?</p>
<p>The teacher has a relationship with the local community college. All kids had to take a machine shop course. I think near the end the students just didnt have the time. I go to an extremely competitive public schools and kids can have up to 7-8 hours of studying/hw a night. So it was just too much for them...</p>
<p>umm during frc reason - the 6 weeks - expect to do at least 15 hrs of labor, if not more. unless u have a big team, then thats good</p>
<p>and umm isnt harvard-westlake a private school :P</p>
<p>^^^ You mean only 15 hours total?!?
I was expecting at least 10 hours a week which is 60 hours total...</p>
<p>i mean 15 hrs per week - 15 hrs total would be a joke of a robot</p>
<p>btw - i speak from experience - my team has gone to the championships three years out of the 5 we have been competing</p>
<p>but seriously, it all depends on how productive your team is and how fast you get your idea down, the number of hours you put in doesn't mean anything if you don't do much in them</p>
<p>its all about productivity, heck you build a beastly robot in 5 hrs a week if you want to, if you had it all planned out (that usually doesn't happen)</p>
<p>i highly recommend a week or two of CADing before anyone actually starts building anything</p>
<p>CAD also has some real world simulation, where if you can build your robot in it and give the appropriate functions/dimensions/movable parts/motors, then you can test your robot and see how it would do</p>
<p>if you can do that, then the four weeks of building will be super easy and streamlined</p>
<p>so i recommend, you and a few other people on your team learn autodesk inventor and autocad and such and then when the season starts, u'll be set</p>
<p>I did all the programming for my team's robot, and it probably took me ~35 hours of coding and debugging.</p>
<p>Luckily, my team is going to have a great programmer willing to put in that time (He helped CalTech's DARPA entry)
I really want more of an estimate of the time required that everyone will need to meet...
Thanks!</p>