Building a team dynamic

The hardest part of being on a new team is the beginning. It is a whole new group of people, and teams have to work fast to build their dynamic and function well together. Metea Robotics Coach Anthony Romeo sees this development with every new team. 8995E was no exception.

“They’re definitely freshmen in every aspect of the word,” Romeo said. “They’re extremely awkward. Talking to me they’re awkward, talking to each other they’re awkward, so it’s kind of funny to see at the beginning of the year, that incredible awkwardness.”

Before working on the Unite Online Challenge, 8995E tackled another project: “Thinking Outside The Box” Photography Challenge. For this challenge, the team had to take photos of things that reminded them of STEM. This competition, like the Unite Online Challenge, was global. After submitting their response, they had high hopes of success.

“We thought we were going to win since our photos were pretty good,” Saha said. “But we didn’t, and then we’re like, ‘okay, then we can do another challenge.’”

The photography challenge was the first project the freshmen did as a team. It helped them get the jitters out and start learning how to mesh together and work best. 

“One of the things that the photography challenge taught us was working as a team,” Parikh said. “I didn’t know anyone else, but the photography challenge was a really great way for all of us to start interacting with each other. I think it was a really great stepping stone into working on a large project.”

The photography challenge gave the team a trial run of working together. In addition, they also met outside of the normal robotics meetings to hang out as a team. They met over Discord or Zoom to play games, watch movies, and get to know each other. This helped them combat the awkwardness of a new team and jump right into being friends.

“My favorite memory would be our movie night,” Parikh said. “That was the first time we were all talking about school, our teachers, our classes, stuff we’re doing. That’s the first time we got out of our comfort zone. We started to get to know each other a little more.”

It seems like a small step, but those small plans helped the team greatly. 

“Now when you see them in a meeting, they talk to each other, they interject, they have no problem saying ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ whereas before, they were very timid, kind of afraid to even mention an idea, so it’s really cool to see that all that stuff they did outside of the meetings really paid off,” Romeo said. “Every positive thing you should do in an e-learning environment or where you can’t really work together, they managed to make it work. They really focused on building that relationship, and it was really nice.”