Part #3: Meeting Musts | SUMMER ROBOTICS: Tips and Tricks for Your Team

Now that your team is all set up and your members have a general idea what being part of the team involves and what they should focus on, you need to start having meetings with everyone. Whether these meetings are to work on building your robot or to coordinate when to do a fundraising event, or a meeting the whole team or just the hardware sub-team, there are some tips we have that will help with all types of meetings.

---

Tip #1: Set a schedule

This is particularly important with meetings for the whole team. You should plan to meet as a whole team at least once a week, but you should keep it consistent so that it's harder to forget when or where you are going to meet up. For example, our team met every Friday at 4:30 in one of our coaches classrooms for most of the season last year (after the COVID restrictions lightened up of course). This was super useful for us to keep consistent, and it didn't make for a confusing calendar. The most important thing to take away is that if you keep jumping your meeting dates from Monday to Thursday to Tuesday, then your team might forget when you were going to meet up. The less confusing of a schedule the better.

Tip #2: Include everyone

This might seem kind of obvious, but it is definitely important. Inclusion is one of FIRST's core values, and the more you practice it outside of competition, the more you'll practice it during competition. It's not always super obvious when someone feels left out, but it can totally destroy their motivation. When your team is having meetings, be sure that everyone gets to say something, even if it's just a simple "I agree with that". You can even ask someone if they are ok with the plan or like the idea if you notice they haven't said much. The last thing you want is for someone not to speak up because they don't feel included, Everyone's opinion and ideas are important even if they don't work or you don't agree (In those cases, make sure you're disagreeing respectfully and with a good attitude).

Tip #3: Use online/virtual meetings

With the pandemic this past season, this was a necessity, but even as we started to move out of restrictions and started having more and more meetings in-person, we still have a significant chunk of our meetings online. It's not always practical to have the whole team meet in-person for a thirty-minute talk about the plan for an outreach program. The sorts of meetings that don't require you physically being together can usually be done through a video call pretty easily. Sometimes this is super useful when a team member is out of town or on a super busy schedule and can't make it to your meeting place on time; it's just more convenient to log into a video call than to make everyone meet in-person. The only downside to virtual and online meetings is that it becomes a lot harder to include everyone, especially if you don't know many of the other team members, so make sure and double check that everyone is included and voices their opinion in online meetings.

Tip #4: Take notes and records for the engineering notebook

This one is also crucial. The competition judges for FTC like to see as much detail as possible in your engineering notebook. Taking meeting notes helps with this so they can follow your thought process for building your robot and organizing your team. Another plus of meeting notes is to help the members that missed the meeting or the other sub-teams to know what your sub-team is working on. Notes are a form of communication. With that in mind, you can't just take notes that say "Jimmy talked about the autonomous program and then we did some stuff with the robot to fix the wheels". I might know what you were talking about if I were at the meeting too, but if I'm a competition judge, I would have no idea what happened at that meeting, and your teammates that weren't there probably wouldn't have a clue either as tp what happened. Your notes should be detailed enough that an outsider would know what all happened and a teammate would be able to easily catch up for the next meeting just by reading the meeting notes. You don't have to write a whole essay on what you did (and please don't because nobody's going to read that much!), just enough so that everyone is on the same page.

There is one other thing to keep in mind: you need everything that happened at the meeting. If you just have one person putting their notes on what the hardware sub-team was doing at the meeting, how are the judges going to know what the software sub-team was doing? Our team uses a google form after each meeting that everybody who was at the meeting fills out with what they were doing and what they saw happening. This helps to get everyone's voice for the notebook and to catalogue absolutely everything that was going on.

Tip #5: Set aside time to be casual and fun

Yes, we are serious. You need to keep FTC fun! It's not supposed to be a big serious club or like a boring class at school. Keep it fun and friendly every time your team gets together. Even if that means having some random meetings every now and then to play frisbee or Pictionary together (We did that more times than I think we'd care to admit!). It is so much easier to work as a team when you are all friends and are having fun, and who doesn't want to have fun at robotics! :)

---

Be on the lookout for our next blog post with more tips and tricks next week about how to communicate efficiently with your teammates, coaches, mentors, parents, sponsors, etc. We hope you enjoy this summer robotics series and put some of these tips to good use with your FTC team.