After competition

Kit Return¶

• Coordinated by Kit Coordinator who will produce a list of unreturned kit following the competition.

• Email LTCs with a list of their teams who still have their kit and ask them to contact the Team Leader for contact details of where to send the Kit Return Pack to. They should pass on these contact details to the Kit Coordinator who will send a Kit Return pack to the team.

• This process may require repeated prompting from the Team Coordinator to the LTCs, and from the LTCs to the Team Leaders to ensure kit is all returned as promptly as possible.

Miscellaneous tasks related to Teams¶

For example; lost property, ensuring prize-winners received their prizes, writing to organisations to deal with any issues arising from the competition.

Email all teams thanking and congratulating them on the year’s competition.¶

Include information/link requesting completion of Team feedback form and advise how teams should apply to reimbursement of expenses relating to the competition.

Dear Team Leaders,

Thank you all so much for being part of SR2017 – this year’s competition was brilliant fun and an excellent showcase for all your hard work over the year. We would, of course, appreciate your feedback on your experience of the competition as we are always striving to make Student Robotics as good as it possibly can be.

Write to the organisation associated with teams who dropped out without notifying SR in advance.¶

Example of email sent to non-informed dropout teams in 2017:

Dear Head Teacher,

I am sorry to have to bring this to your attention but we felt it was important to inform you that a member of your staff entered a team in this year’s Student Robotics programme and was duly assigned a place and provided with a kit and the associated support. However, they did not inform us that they were intending to drop out and not compete at this year’s competition in April 2017. Moreover, despite numerous reminders and contact being attempted to ensure prompt return of their kit, they are still in possession of the SR kit nearly three months after the competition.

We do appreciate that sometimes things do not go to plan and despite one’s best efforts, it is not possible to progress with the Student Robotics programme, by either failing to get a team together or making progress with building the robot. In such situations, we do understand when teams inform us and explain their predicament and if we can, we suggest ways of working around the problems with more support or input. If a team is unable to continue and sadly needs to drop out, depending on the stage at which this occurs, we sometimes try to get the kit back from them so that we can pass it on to another team who will benefit from the kit and experience. If it’s too late to do this then we will update our systems so that we are not expecting you on the day of the competition and make a note to contact you regarding kit return in due course.

However, in your case, as your member of staff (the Team Leader) did not alert us to the fact their team were dropping out this meant that another team (and we had a waiting list of teams who were desperate to get their hands on a kit) were denied the chance to benefit from the various skills and experience that participating in Student Robotics provides and the opportunity to compete in this year’s competition. Moreover, our volunteers have wasted their time by trying to contact and engage you when they could have spent time helping teams who were actually participating. As I mentioned before, the discourtesy continues by how our repeated contact to chase your member of staff to return the SR kit to us has been ignored. They are in receipt of a shipping pack with instructions of how to return the kit to us but we have still not received it, to date. I’m sure that you would agree that this is not acceptable behaviour and does not set a good example to your students.

We have made a note that your organisation’s team dropped out without informing anyone and this will impact on any applications to enter Student Robotics in future years. As a charity which was set up to benefit as many young people as possible we just cannot afford the negative impacts of teams, such as yours, who do not value the opportunity given to them. Although we appreciate that there are many pressures on teachers, we have been saddened by the lack of courtesy extended to us throughout this process. Please ensure that the SR kit is returned to us urgently.

Feedback¶

The Team Coordinator should seek feedback from the Team Leaders, LTCs and Mentors on their experiences and consider updating and refining processes. In addition, the Team Coordinator should also reflect on own processes and update and refine as appropriate. The Team Coordinator should liaise with relevant members of the SR team to improve processes.

Update Team Archive¶

Update Team Archive document with outcome of teams from this year's competition, i.e. whether dropped out (and when) or competed.

Ideally this Archive would capture more and different types of information from each team during the SR programme which would be a relevant and useful resource for future years. This would help to generate statistics about the teams involved in SR each year which would help to identity trends and to inform future organisation of SR.

Attribution

This page is based on work done by Fiona Gillan, originally published at https://github.com/fgillan/sr-team-coord/wiki/After-competition, which was under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.