I just started teaching/coaching High School VRC. I have previously taught/coached middle school IQ. My MS team qualified to go to worlds two out of two years we competed… so I feel like I should know what it takes to motivate a team to be successful.
I have this giant new space and tons of equipment and tools.
The robotics program at this school has been around for a decade. However, I would characterize us as a new organization because we lost all of our experienced students to graduation before I arrived. Also, the last couple of years haven’t really given my current students much experience.
The issue I am running into is that my students don’t seem to be that motivated. They don’t have a hunger to compete. They have shown dedication by all the time they have spent in my room but their work is not very efficient. It’s been 8 weeks since we started back to school and they don’t have a working prototype yet!
Maybe I just need to get them signed up for a competition and make them compete with a terrible robot so they can see what is required? (sounds mean but I’m at a loss for what I can do at this point).
I am hoping that someone here can advise me on how I should approach the issue of motivation.
Thanks in advance.
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From my experience with our team last season, I think it really does motivate them when there is a competition to work towards.
@Lauren_Harter and I were talking about possible ways to make them finish their prototype and actually test it. We ended up registering them for a competition and it was a bit of crashing and burning, but they were able to see the strengths and weaknesses of their design and had a clear goal for what they wanted to do with their robot and how their strategy could play out.
It may be a little rough on them during that competition, but I think a little failure could really help motivate them!
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@Mark_Johnston Is there another school you could scrimmage with? I used to do that and it motivated them to get something moving and they learned the rules and game dynamics, before I paid $$ for a tournament!
Sometimes watching an advanced team’s video can also help, like this video.
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I think this is a good idea. I would reframe it treating the competition as a learning activity. In other sports (football, baseball, basketball) games are treated as events, but also opportunities for growth. Good teams get better as the year progresses - you are better in game 10 then you were in game 1. I think with robotics, we should treat tournaments the same way. Be better in January than you are now. Treat early season tournaments (or scrimmages like @David_Kelly mentioned) as learning opportunities. You also get the added benefit of having a clear goal for the students to work towards. Research tells that having clear goals and quick feedback is very motivating. So yes, I’d get them signed up for a competition or scrimmage as quick as you can.
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This is a great question. I also was blessed to have a core of highly motivated and skilled kids in the program for 4 years. When they graduated, I worried about maintaining that same level of competitiveness and dedication.
One thing that my colleague and I found helpful was reminding ourselves that each year and each group of kids is going to be different, and our job is to meet them where they’re at. We came up with some ideas to help us get to know the kids better so that we could better understand what kinds of guidance and support they might need. At our first meeting of the year, we had kids pair off and interview each other by asking a set of questions such as, “What’s your name?” “What grade are you in?” “What previous robotics experience have you had?” “Why did you sign up for robotics?” “What would you like to get out of your participation on the team?” Etc. When they were done, everyone introduced their interview-partner to the whole group. This year, we used JamBoard to collect all the interview answers, and that gave us (the coaches) an archive, so to speak, of data about the students. We have also introduced, this year, the concept of “competition readiness.” What that means is that we’ve set some minimal standards or benchmarks that teams must achieve before we will send them to a tournament. They have to have a robot that can score at least 1 point with driver-control; they need to have a notebook that scores at least 20 points on the rubric; and they need to score at least 10 points on the team interview rubric. We’ve enlisted some of our colleagues to help us in this by conducting mock interviews every few weeks; and we will give teams regular feedback on their notebooks, as well.
There’s been no push-back from the students about these new measures (something we considered), and it seems to be having the desired effect of encouraging them to plan better, manage their time more deliberately, and monitor their progress. Of course, we are still registering our teams for upcoming events even though they may not have working robots, yet - but they don’t need to know that!
Above all, we never stray from these two tenets: Robotics is about learning; and it should be fun! And it’s about them, not us!! (Ok, three tenets!)
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Great ideas @David_Wasser! Thanks for posting.
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@David_Wasser, first of all, Welcome to the Community! Your reply reminded me of something that I think all teachers can struggle with from time to time - I know I did after particular years…
This idea of remembering that all groups are different is what keeps what we do interesting and exciting, but is also what makes it really difficult at times, too. Your response of connecting to students early on not only lays a good foundation for a team to begin building a learning community among themselves, but having a solid relationship gives you motivational cues to turn back to when some students may be losing touch with their intrinsic motivation.
Being able to remind students of their own words and reasoning for joining robotics is a hugely powerful motivation and barometer of learning. I bet if you asked them the same questions at the end of a season, about what they were learned and what they’re looking forward to for next year - you could potentially keep some of the continuity and ‘legacy’ moments for graduating students alive. (Sometimes students will take more meaning from what another student said, than what we, as teachers, tell them.)
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@Seth_Ogoe_Ayim another great thread about starting a new VRC team.
