Creating The Team

Creating your Teams

After gathering a base of team members, establishing the team or teams in an organization is an important next step. In addition to registering the team on RobotEvents, deciding how many teams are necessary, as well as discussing team roles should be prioritized as well.

Deciding How Many Teams

There are many factors that come into play when deciding how many teams to create, including, but not limited to:

Available Team Members

One important thing to consider is the number of participants that will be participating on a VEX Robotics team. While team sizes can range from one to upwards of ten members, having too many or too few members per team can make progress inefficient with regards to creating a functional robot. More information on an effective team size can be found in the Member Allocation and Management segment of this article.

Budget

When deciding whether or not to create additional teams within your organization, it is important to determine whether or not an additional team will factor into the budget. When starting a new team, or multiple teams at once, you are effectively doubling your startup costs with additional parts and logistical fees, among other things, that will have to be purchased. For more information on organizing a budget for your teams, please see the Financial Breakdown segment of this document.

Logistics

In addition to having the manpower and budget to create an additional team, the logistics of competing with more than one team must be taken into account as well. Hosting teams will require some place for these teams to work, whether this is just a desk, or a full field setup. While a full field can be shared by numerous teams, it is beneficial to take spatial concerns into account when deciding how many teams to create. In addition, transportation to competitions must be factored in as well, whether this is a school-sponsored bus, or independent transportation on behalf of the team members.

In addition to the above, organizing your members into effective teams is essential. For more information on Member Allocation and Management, please see here.

Registering your Teams

Registering a team, in an VEX Robotics competition, can be done on RobotEvents. When registering teams through RobotEvents, you will be asked to choose a team number, among other important information, as well as letters for each team. Your team number will be consistent across every team you register in a given competition, and the letter will be the differing indicator for each team (94999E and 94999X, or BLRS and BLRS2).

Teams Contributed to this Article:

• BLRS (Purdue SIGBots)