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Team Roles

There are many jobs you need filled on a team:

Captains​

There should only ever be 1 lead captain. There can be co-captains who take on some of the responsibilities, but there should always be only one top.

Unlike sports, the captain of a robotics team is not just the person who leads the team onto the field, and goes out for the coin toss. The team captain is the student focal point and a role model for the team. The captain will oversee the team’s activities as a whole and is responsible for:

  • Building the team
  • Focusing the team on the project
  • Advocating for the team
  • Setting the agenda and the tone of the meetings
  • Assigning a job/role for everyone on the team and never allowing a person be idle
  • Ensuring the team has a strategy and a plan to execute the strategy
  • Ensuring everyone’s ideas are heard, and works to find compromises
  • Regularly checking team goals and deadlines
  • Helping to establish and promote team identity and spirit
  • Gathering information from sub-groups and keeping everyone on schedule with project timelines
  • During competitions, managing the team schedule. Leading the group when talking to judges, scouts, or guests in the pit during competition
  • Regularly updating parents, teachers, sponsors, and other interested parties
  • Managing PR for the team
  • Training their replacement

Captains will also be often be the point of contact for emergency purchases, providing advice, and spending extra time.

Captains are appointed roles by the coaches and the previous captain.

Programming Lead​

Leads a sub-team responsible for the robot’s programming and use of sensors. The programming lead is responsible for managing:

  • Writing quality and well-documented programs for the autonomous part of the competition
  • Writing code for the driver control
  • Selecting hardware and software to improve functionality and performance
  • Negotiating with other subteams for test time and access to the robot
  • Updating programs and code as necessary to adapt to design or strategy changes
  • Knowing the rules and regularly monitoring forums and resources for rule updates, and ensuring team compliance
  • Ensuring the code is properly protected
  • Ensuring other members of the programming team are prepared and educated to work on the code.
  • Training their replacement

Build Lead​

Leads a sub-team responsible for the design, fabrication, construction, and testing of the robot and its parts. The build team lead is responsible for managing:

  • Ensuring all team members take safety precautions while building the robot
  • Using the ideas from brainstorming to design the robot
  • Delegating systems and ideas to other teammates
  • Taking the robot design from concept to a working product
  • Making decisions about the mechanical design
  • Investigating different solutions to solve mechanical design challenges
  • Testing to ensure that all mechanisms on the Robot work effectively together
  • Achieving consensus and making changes based on input from the team
  • Knowing the rules and regularly monitoring forums and resources for rule updates, and ensuring team compliance

Business/marketing/engineering notebook lead​

Leads a sub-team responsible for documenting the robot design process, media and connecting with the local community. The business lead is responsible for managing:

  • Completing the team section and business plan (and/or strategic plan and sustainability plan) for inclusion in the Engineering Notebook and Portfolio
  • Working with the Build and Programming teams to assure team activities, actions, failures, and successes are recorded (including photos) and documented in the Engineering Notebook
  • Communicating team activities through social media
  • Taking photos or video footage of the build process and events for use in marketing and outreach efforts
  • Assembling promotional materials to showcase the team capabilities
  • Coordinating, preparing and submitting “Promote” and “Compass” award entries
  • Contacting the local media, surrounding schools, or civic organizations to increase public awareness of the team, and to show how students benefit from the competitive robotics experience

The Drive Team​

The drive team is the highest privilege on the team. Drivers, much like captains, are appointed based on commitment and understanding of robot and programming by the coaches. The drive team must have complete mastery of the mechanisms, programming, and rules.

Team leadership should clearly establish how to become a driver at the beginning of the season, and if there are multiple people who want to drive, hold a competition, give everyone 10 minutes of practice and 1 minute of competition and see who performs best.

Subteam Member Roles​

Depending on their personal interests and skills, all team members will be assigned roles and responsibilities within the general categories of build, programming and business. However, students will be expected to flex across the sub-teams depending on the needs of the team during the season. ALL team members will contribute to the Engineering Notebook. It is expected that everyone will get exposure to various aspects of planning, strategic thinking, leadership, design, CAD, fabrication, assembly, marketing, media and communications, public relations, alliance scouting and most importantly fun!

CAD Lead​

Responsible for learning and becoming a liason between CAD and the build and marketing/engineering notebook team. This role is also expected to learn how to use digital fabrication equiptment availible and to teach other teammates how to use CAD and the equiptment.

Adult Leadership​

As with every team, there is a set amount of adult involvement. This being said, coaches and mentors take larger roles in some areas than others. Our coaches back off of the robot: they will direct students to the right answer, but will not lay hands on the robot and do any of it themselves. Coaches will be more involved in monitoring the safety aspect of the team, as a small mistake can be very dangerous. Coaches can also be used to enforce rules.