There have been multitudes of polls and posts on Chief Delphi on this topic. For the Steel Hawks, it's been an evolution and continues to be. New people first join the Robotics Club and then decide if they want to commit to the team.
When I first started on the team, there was no system or known criteria for recognizing which students qualified to be on the team. I think it was up to the teachers and whether they remembered if somebody showed up at meetings or not. It was error prone - sometimes people's names were on the team shirt even when they did not contribute to the team. Last year, the Executive Board (EB) tried to define some fair way to distinguish team vs. club members by counting the number of hours that students came during the build season. The cutoff was at 120 hours. That number was realistic for many members but it scared off the less dedicated/passionate people. We also defined some of the team member benefits such as name on the t-shirt, eligibility for travelling to away competitions and FIRST scholarships, etc. Keeping track of these hours was another chore that students ended up loathing. They had to keep a notebook journal to record what they did and get their entry approved before going home. It was a step in the right direction but wasn't perfect. There wasn't an easy way to see the data in aggregate form or run a report on a stack of notebooks.
This summer, after surveying what many other teams do, the EB proposed a points system. It does address many of the issues we found in the other methodology. The points system gives credit for non-technical aspects of a robotics team such as fundraising, working on award submissions, outreach, and attending competitions. After all, we do want to emphasize that building a robot is not the only thing we do on the team.
Below is a table listing ways to earn points:
| Activity | Point Value |
| 1 hour of Build | one point per hour |
| Assisting in cleanup | 1 |
| Attending Kick Off | 5 |
| Attending Off-Season Competition | 5 |
| Attending a Regional Competition | 10 |
| Attending a Fundraising event (i.e. bake sale) | 5 |
| Contacting a potential sponsor for fundraising | 3 |
| Securing funds | divide $ amount by 200 |
| Filling out an application on time | 3 |
| Chairman's Award Contribution | 20 |
| Engineering Inspiration Award Contribution | 8 |
| Entrepreneurship Award Contribution | 8 |
| Judges’ Award Contribution | 5 |
| Safety Animation Award Contribution | 10 |
| Team Spirit Award Contribution | 5 |
| Woodie Flowers Award Contribution | 5 |
The next step is to implement a way to track these points. One option was to have a chart with everyone's name on it and paste stickers to show points earned. While that makes a nice display, it lacks on the reporting aspect. One of the teachers wanted to be able to use the number of hours spent in robotics as proof for independent study credit.
Since I had acquired some skills with Google spreadsheets while building the inventory tool over the summer (I'll post something at a later date about it), I put together a simple spreadsheet to track these points. Here's a sample of the Points Tracker. It's still being tested and then there's a matter of training the team to use it as well...
I will post further on this when there are updates.
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