<p>I wanted to get some insight from some of you guys who are in these clubs that do science or engineering based competitions. How do you get your club motivated? How do you make sure they study and do the work?</p>
<p>How are your meetings run to keep it interesting but educational?</p>
<p>We don’t. Our meetings are super drab because nobody actually cares about the substance behind what the club is supposed to be about.</p>
<p>The only thing that sort of works for us is Academic Decathlon because we have food and impromptu speech practice just about every meeting.</p>
<p>@capitalamerica What type of improptu speech practice? And yeah, I’m having the same sort of problem with some of my clubs. Not enough motivation. Trying to prepare for next year.</p>
<p>@I2Hope In Academic Decathlon, one of our ten (because "deca"thlon) subjects is speeches. For the subject, we’re to give and be scored on one 3 1/2 minute prepared speech that we write ourselves beforehand on any topic we want, and then do a 1 1/2 minute impromptu speech based on a list of 3 random topics that the judges give us. The topics can range from current world issues to who your hero is to what subject you would teach if you were a high school teacher. </p>
<p>I don’t know how exactly you would integrate that into a Science club, though. If it’s a team competition based club, try to go that extra mile and make/find tests for them to take. If you’re really serious and there is a set team like in Academic Decathlon, threaten that they be booted out if they don’t score high enough, like in a class. If its more relaxed than that, then there’s not much you can do to really force them to study harder than they want to.</p>
<p>It helps if you guys have already won in the past to show the current members that they can really achieve something (like having a medal or a plaque or a trophy or something). If not, it’ll be even harder to motivate them then.</p>
<p>As for letting them be interesting and educational, have a set time for all the important information to be said and all the important work to be done, while still letting them talk amongst themselves so they don’t get bored to death. Instill discipline but don’t be too iron-fisted. </p>