Why do teams voluntarily do FIRST without adult technical mentors?

[Andy Baker]

We need to talk. Please sit down.

Let's discuss something that defines FIRST. Sometimes, this is the big white elephant in the corner that everyone wants to ignore... but it needs to be talked about. There are many opinions on this subject.

Why do FIRST teams start with the intention of this being a "student design competition"? Many teams operate this way. We see teams who are proud about having a "100% designed and built robot". These teams get awards for their student involvement.

I can respect this. They worked hard. They learned much. However, more likely than not, they performed not so well at a regional. These teams saw other teams come in with 4-5 engineering mentors and compete better. These other teams, with more adult involvement, may have engineers working in the pits, along side the students. They may have skilled trades machinists making parts for their team during the build season. They may have professional machine designers creating gearboxes or writing code.

Are both teams learning? yes.

Dare I ask... Which "team" is better? What defines "better"?

FIRST was founded on "Inspiration". It still is the cornerstone. Dean, Woodie, and the FIRST Board of Directors are involved because of this idea. It is a thrill to inspire someone to be great. It is a thrill to be inspired by others.

I contend that the best "team" is an equal balance of student involvement, teacher involvement, and engineer involvement. In my mind, can a engineer design something on a robot and be proud of that design? You bet. Some teams frown on this. Some teams, mentors, and students preach that this is wrong. What do you think? Why is that?

So... there is it is. This will be a debate. Opinions will be given, and people will disagree. That is ok. Let is out. It will be healthy.

Andy B.

[sanddrag]

We need to talk. Please sit down.
Hehe, I don't usually stand up while on my computer, but each to his own I guess. :D Anyhow...

I contend that the best "team" is an equal balance of student involvement, teacher involvement, and engineer involvement. In my mind, can a engineer design something on a robot and be proud of that design? You bet. Some teams frown on this. Some teams, mentors, and students preach that this is wrong. What do you think? Why is that?
I would agree with this. The "correct" amount of mentor involvement in FRC is one of the most difficult balances to stike. Almost as difficult as the mentor question "let fail and learn or succeed and inspire?" but that is for another thread.

This year, we had more mentor involvement than ever, and you could see it in the robot. I'm also afraid that the students learned a little less than ever before. It is all about the balance, and having been both a student and a mentor, I can tell you it is not an easy one to strike.

One interesting thing that was said at our end of the season team meeting (to evaluate the goods and the bads was this). Our main teacher/mentor said to the students (not word for word, but approximately) "In your surveys, you all complained that the mentors did too much of the work. Well, before you ever think about accusing us of that again, you better not be sitting in the corner chatting and playing games when there is a robot to be built" It didn't really come off all that harsh but that was the best I could remember what was said.

Anyway, for all you students out there, I ask you not to complain about your mentors steeling the show when you are not willing to get involved. It is hard for us mentors to "just say no" because FRC is so dang fun. Most likely, it will be hard for some of us to hand you a tool and say "here build this" when it is easier for us to just to do it.

But the mentors already know everything. The point is not always to get the robot done fastest, it is for you students to learn something.

So, for the students, I ask of you this. Grab the tools, touch the machines, give your mentors some chairs to sit down on. Get yourselves in there working. Don't be just an onlooker while all the adults are fixing your broken robot. Sometimes us mentors "forget" that a student is the person who should be holding the screwdriver, so I make it your job to take it away from us.

Anyway, there was once I time when I used to tell the judges "look, our robot was 100% student built" but I later realized that isn't at all what they are looking for. The end goal in all this is to get the partnership between young students and industry professionals. Any bunch of kids can meet up and play with tools (which is a great learning experience) BUT, only FRC kids get to work with real professionals, and you will get a lot more out of it that way, even if you aren't the one holding the screwdriver ALL the time.

[sirbleedsalot]

While our team prides itself with having a completely student built robot, especially since we were able to be in the winning alliance this year in St. Louis. I don't think that our team would refuse help from anyone, it is just that there is not many engineers around our area, and we have never taken an active role in finding adult leaders besides teachers and parents. As the former team captain I think that while every team is different they all need to be able to teach/inspire the students if this means having the older kids teaching programming, farmers teaching how to run roller chain, or an engineer teaching a student about CAD. It does not matter where the knowledge is coming from as long as everyone is having a good time and learning something.

[mechanicalbrain]

Hmm something I'm currently dealing with. We are semi student ran and I'm trying to make our team more student controlled. I found that while mentors may be skilled with engineering and create great designs they tend to not be practical and often mentors don't actually have experience in robotics just what in theory should work. In fact mentors can easily cause more trouble then solving problems. One thing i see is mentors coming up with ideas and trying to imprint them on students. What ends up happening is that the robot really has little work by the students and it shows (and thats not necessarily a good thing). Even though I'm not a mentor i still have to fight the urge to force my ideas on others and am often better off for it. Ive also found that the reason certain teams do well is because the same mentor is designing the robot each year. One thing students need to learn is how to pass on knowledge to other students so when they leave the kids still their know what the heck their doing. I do this by making other students do the work (this may sound kind of lazy but has a specific purpose) even though i would prefer to do it myself. This is great because if I'm gone for a reason or want to do multiple projects at once i don't have to worry about anyones competence. How many of you can tell some kids set up a test robot and all the wiring and we need the system done by the end of the day? Ill tell you its pretty cool to watch them go off and know they know exactly what their doing. Anyhew ill bet if ran right a student run team can outperform almost any mentor ran team (but not those with insane resources!).

[Arefin Bari]

Very good thread Andy...

When someone tells me the word "mentor" I think of someone who will be there to teach me, and then watch over my shoulder when I am building cool things. If it is not possible for me to design or machine a part, or code certain section, then the mentor take over and solve the problems. I have seen many teams work like that. The students love it, because they get the best out of the program.

When I was a student in HS... I have had my engineers show me a design and tell me how it works. I did learn stuff when they did that. I also learned when they handed me a 3" by 3" by 1/2" thick block alumium and said "we need to make the holders for the ball bearing and the plate which will attach the side plates together. You need a quarter inch hole in the middle so you can attach the ball bearing. Go take weights outta there and make it look cool."

The best team out there would be the team who understands the meaning of "Teamwork." When a group of students, engineers, teachers, and parents come together and makes sure that the students learn throughout the build season, it is the best feeling. There is something that I like to achieve more than the awards. I like the feeling when the team comes together, builds, and then have the machine go out there on the field and watch it dominate.

That is just 2 cents.

[RbtGal1351]

One interesting thing that was said at our end of the season team meeting (to evaluate the goods and the bads was this). Our main teacher/mentor said to the students (not word for word, but approximately) "In your surveys, you all complained that the mentors did too much of the work. Well, before you ever think about accusing us of that again, you better not be sitting in the corner chatting and playing games when there is a robot to be built" It didn't really come off all that harsh but that was the best I could remember what was said.
Note: I'm a student and am entering my 3rd year in FIRST. I was a founding member on our team, 1351.

Wow, I completely agree with that. That happens in our lab a lot, but we're one of the teams that airs on the side of less-mentor-interaction. In the beginning, this was mostly because we didn't have very many mentors; but now not all of us are willing to be mentored. (This poses another problem for mentors.) Honestly, I wasn't too open to being mentored, especially after having almost no help the previous year.
...leading to my point...
I'm not sure that teams without so many mentors realize that they could get mentors or the advantages mentors would bring. They don't necessarily realize that they aren't doing things the best way, that there is another way to approach their current problem.

For example (this is a classic 1351 story), our rookie year (2004), we were putting together our gearboxes. We just couldn't seem to get them together right, we'd accidentally put the bolts in the wrong direction, we put the sprocket on backwards, the spacing was off, etc. So we'd take them apart, and each time, we had to take the key out of the axle. And this took us almost forever, because we were sitting there with a hammer, screwdriver and some pliers. About 2-3 hours after we started the job (for the sixth time at least, and I'm not exaggerating), one of our mentors walked in, saw what we were doing, and decided to help (we needed it...). He walked over to our vice, put the keys in the vice, lifted up on the axles, and finished the job in less than 30 seconds. We were all astonished, and stood there stunned for the next couple minutes.

We had no idea there was an easier way to accomplish that; we just assumed that we were doing it correctly, and that there wasn't a better or easier or faster way. However, we will never forget this lesson.
Hopefully, though, we've learned that there may always be a better, more efficient method to approach a problem--and we don't have to figure everything out ourselves. And being taught something rather than figuring it out yourself doesn't mean that you won't learn and remember it.


However, I am opposed to the teams who have entire groups of mentors and adults doing work for them, (e.g. scouting at regionals), especially when they aren't teaching a student what they are doing. I believe the mentors are there to teach us what we need to do to accomplish a goal, how to go about it, and what is important in running a team. I don't believe that they are there to do those things for us.
(An exception could be an extremely small team, where there simply aren't enough students to do all the work, so long as they are still learning what the mentors are doing, and the students are aware that the adults took care of task xyz for them.)


One thing that's up to debate for me and my team is who should be running the organization and the managing of the team -- students or adults?
The students need to learn how to run a team; that is a major part of FIRST. However, it is definately not something you can easily learn on your own. This coincides with all the other threads on how your team is organized, so please don't just talk about that; but perhaps the leadership positions should be occupied by student(s), with an almost-personal mentor to directly help the student-leader out.


Thanks Andy, this needed to be addressed.
~Stephanie
Team 1351

ps- sorry about the long post :o

[Cory]

I would agree with this. The "correct" amount of mentor involvement in FRC is one of the most difficult balances to stike.

I could write an entire page about this, but really all it comes down to is the fact that there is no "correct" amount of mentor involvement.

This thread could go on for ten pages and I guarentee the only thing that will be agreed on is "to each their own"

[Al Skierkiewicz]

The best team out there would be the team who understands the meaning of "Teamwork." When a group of students, engineers, teachers, and parents come together and makes sure that the students learn throughout the build season, it is the best feeling.

I think this is the best way to run a team. There are two things that really hurt when I am at a competition, one is the team with no teamwork, the mentors do everything or they do nothing. (I am shocked to find mentors pushing students away from the robot in the pits) They even refuse help from other teams. The whole team suffers no matter what the teamwork situation is.
The other thing is a student dominated team who is looking for assistance but doesn't know how to ask for help or is too embarrassed to ask either a mentor or another team. Often this team is suffering due to a minor problem. (i.e. a misaligned bearing, bad wiring or a code bug.) If I could get teams to pledge themselves to ask for help when needed (before or during competitions) then everyone would be better off.
My point is that you don't need mentors to make a good robot but it helps and the same could be said for students. However, when you work together, you can accomplish more and have a lot of fun too! Students, this may be the biggest oportunity you will ever get, take advantage of talking, learning, and working with your mentors.

[Steve W]

But the mentors already know everything. The point is not always to get the robot done fastest, it is for you students to learn something.



Ouch, I guess that I can't be a mentor.

I am one that is not a teacher, not a student, not a parent and definitely not an engineer. I am a person that loves to figure out solutions to problems and loves the way FIRST inspires young and old people (myself included). I have spent 3 seasons with a veteran team. When I joined the team I found that the mentors did a lot of the work. Over the last 3 years there has been more and more involvement by the students. This is progress and inspiring. We work more and more as a team and the students are taking on more and more responsibilities. Will this continue? Probably not. Why you ask. Well every team goes through cycles. Every team goes through all of their students every 4 years. Every student is different. This is no different than the real world. People come and people go. What is great about FIRST is that there seems to be a lot of mentors that will only leave one way. This base group are inspiring students and mentors alike. They are there to help the greater good of FIRST. These people share their experience with others. This is where other teachers, mentors, engineers and students can get the inspiration they need to make their teams better. When this happens, all of the base mentors get inspired to do more and the cycle goes on.

I must admit that I learn as much from the students if not more than they learn from me. I hope that as time goes on that I will be able to pass my knowledge on to others more than I take.

A proper balance of mentors, engineers and students is one were they are all learning from each other, all being inspired and most important, that they are all having fun.

[GeorgeTheEng]

One of my fellow mentors hit the perfect phrase in my mind... "Lead by Example" In some cases that may be simple direction or even answering questions but letting the kids work on thier own. Or it may involve doing something complex either with the students by your side or guiding them through your thought process afterwards (though I dislike the last one because of time constraints that usually gets skipped).

The important thing is to avoid the situation where the students feel they are not part of the design and build process. Where they feel that thier presence is not needed or wanted when the robot is being constructed. It leaves the kids with no pride in what has been accomplished. It doesn't make them feel part of the team.

We are actually going through a radical team reorganization to avoid that exact issue. Personally, when the kids feel that way I have to beleive that myself and the other mentors have failed our kids.

However the team decides to operate, the important thing is that the sponsors and school adminstration are happy. (In my case I found out yesterday my VP was livid that the students had such a small part in the build) And also that the kids are having a worthwhile and fun experience.

Personally, I sometimes find mentors are too limited in thier decisions. Engineers tend to stick with "well, we know how to do this so we'll keep doing it this way". Students, esp when they come and go tend to bring creativity and different approaches that us old curmudgeon sometime lack.

[Kims Robot]

Great Thread!! Though I feel like we've discussed this before. However, I dont think I have seen the quality of the responses that I see here so far!

Sanddrag, I 100% agree with you. Its one thing if mentors are shoving students away, but its something else if they are sitting in the corner waiting for a mentor to give them something to do. I just had a huge discussion with our new teacher last night about this. So many students these days wait for things to happen to them. If they didnt have enough to do, it was someone else's fault, the mentors did too much. If they fail a class, its because the teacher gave too much work... etc etc. Students these days need to stand up and get involved themselves, take ownership, take leadership, because they are all smart and they are all capable. Like I said, Im not talking about when a student asks to help and a mentor snubs him or her, Im taking about when the student doesnt ask!

Stephanie, great points also... a mentor is not a mentor until they teach something. Doing something for the team, and not working with the students or even just showing them how you did it afterward, is NOT mentoring. But I also want to answer your question:
One thing that's up to debate for me and my team is who should be running the organization and the managing of the team -- students or adults?
Personally, I think this is another great place to make the balance. Last year, I ran the whole team, subteams mostly ran themselves, but I as a mentor made the decisions... it was our rookie year and thats the way it worked out. However, this year, we are learning. We are going to have a group of students (we are doing elections), along with me, a teacher and another mentor. Students can learn from leadership examples just as much if not more than they can learn from engineering examples. I think the students should be involved and have equal say in making team decisions. The teacher and I have worries on the side of our corporation and the school which may occassionally cause us to override decisions, but I would say 99% can be shared decisions.

Back to Andy's question...
Which "team" is better? What defines "better"?
I would say the balanced team is the best, but one of the things I love is that FIRST brings so many different types of teams, mentors, etc to the competition. What I have failed to see in this post so far is, that teachers can be great FIRST mentors as well. Our teacher last year was originally an industrial engineer. She knew the mechanical side better than any of my mentors, plus she was a teacher and a mom so she had great skills at dealing with the students. I've seen plenty of teams run with just a powerful set of teachers who are great at what they do, and act as mentors to the students. I think this works fine. I still think the balance is better because part of FIRST's goal is to expose students to real engineers, but the students on these non mentored teams get exposure to other teams at competitions, locally, and here on CD.

Every team is unique, has its own problems, has its own strengths. I think the ideal team is one that has industry mentors, a strong teacher involvement, and motivated kids who want to take ownership and leadership. The mentors are there to "mentor", to help the students learn the engineering process, to show them new ways, faster ways, better ways of doing things. The only time I think it goes too far is when the mentors do everything on the team and just drag the students along for the ride. Just watching someone do their job is not inspiring. Having them explain how they do it, or even getting you to help them, or do pieces yourself, is inspiring.

As for what defines "better", then I have to agree with Cory. This is going to be a place where to each their own. If the students are learning, and they are inspired to look up to people who are in the science and technology fields, whether it is because of a project or a teacher or a mentor, FIRST has accomplished its goal. The reality of this world is that industry is small compared to the number of high schools, even smaller is the number of people willing to volunteer their own precious time (while I am thrilled with my amazing 20 mentors, I think Harris has over 1700 people working at our division... thats only 1%!!!), so not every team can have the luxury of an abundance of mentors. Should they keep trying to get some? yes! Can parents and teachers be mentors? Of course!!

[KenWittlief]

I think the problem here is that FIRST is so complex, and the yearly robot games are so much fun that people get lost in it, get caught up in it, and never see the big picture.

If the core of FIRST was something more mundain, like a popsickle stick bridge building contest, or an egg drop contest then we would not have thousands of HS students lineing up to join FIRST because dropping eggs out of a 5 story window is just so much fun.

But building a 100 lb, 2HP drivetrain robot, and getting to drive or control it in matches against other teams - what a blast!

Thats where people lose sight of the big picture. Im willing to bet some teams dont even know there is a big picture.

Our society and culture needs more engineers and scientists. If you put up a poster at school, and had an engineer come in all day saturday to talk about engineering, how many students would show up, to listen to someone talk all day about data driven analysis, the engineering design cycle, closed loop feedback control systems and the intimate details of PID loops?

Can students put together a team, take the kit and build something that runs, and even compete in the games successfully? Absolutely.

Can students figure out what a career as an engineer or scientist will be like on a day to day basis, without ever talking to an engineer, or getting the chance to work side by side with one for 13 weeks or more? Can students re-invent all the processes and concepts that engineers have created and developed and refined over the last 100 years? No way!

[Freddy Schurr]

I think it depends on each team situation and how it is ran. For our team, we are 100% student built, student made, robotics team. We have no engineers and adult-technical mentors. And thats what makes us proud, as mentors, that we can show and teach students about science and engineering. Yes, every year we try to get engineers to help and show better techniques on how parts and components should be made but we can't. Do I think it fair that engineers are working on the robots in the pits or at home, NO but everyone has they own idea on how it describe by FIRST.

I agree with Arefin, that when someone "tells me the word "mentor" I think of someone who will be there to teach me, and then watch over my shoulder when I am building cool things". That why I decided to stay on board and continue to help my team, because I can provided information and techniques to better help the team in the following years.

So in closing, ( I feel like I am in a debate) I think the one thing thats needs to be important throughout this, is that if we are teaching students and they learn and applied what we are saying to better understand who they are and the world, then thats great.

[Sean Schuff]

My first thought when I read the opening message in this thread was "What is Andy Baker doing up at 12:30 AM? Isn't that waaaaayyy past his bed time?!"

I like what I’m reading here and I agree with Kim that the quality of responses is far greater than anything else I’ve read.

I have seen this discussion played out before on these forums and I always feel compelled to reply. I am one of those people who used to spout about how our robot was student built and how all of our ideas were original to our team and blah, blah, blah. Looking back on those days all I can think is "what a bunch of crap!"

It's not that I should not have been pleased with those accomplishments but I was not proud of them for the right reasons. I was trying to make a statement against team's whose robots have a significant amount of professional engineering and manufacturing going into them. Boy was I naïve. FIRST is not about scoring a team’s success based on what percentage of the design, manufacturing, scouting and so on that the students do. It is about the impact it has on students and their future pursuits no matter how that is accomplished.

This year our team “borrowed” ideas from other teams (hey, sharing is a part of the spirit of FIRST, right?) and put them to use on our robot. One was a two-speed shift-on-the-fly transmission and the other was an omni wheel. Both were courtesy of Andy Baker and the Technokats. (Thanks Andy!) We did have our engineers and students do some tweaking to make them fit our needs but the fundamental ideas came from another team. And both worked phenomenally well; so much so that we finally won our first competition in our 9 year history. Sharing is the spirit of FIRST and I think we employed those resources well this year.

In the last few years I have made a conscious effort to correct those members of our team that point out how Team So-N-So has a robot that was built by engineers. So what?! It’s their team! How would we like it if other teams told us how to do our business? Besides, who has time to analyze other teams like this anyway? How counterproductive and what a tremendous waste of time.

There is no one correct way to function within the world of FIRST and there is no magic recipe for team success but staying focused on your team and working as a team certainly play big parts. And any mentor worth their salt will tell you that the ingredient none of us has control over – luck – plays a significant part in each year’s game! While chance favors the prepared mind (and prepared team) a certain amount of luck will always give you a boost or take you out of contention.

In my opinion I think FIRST takes teamwork to a whole new level. Not just among members of the same team but also among competing teams. Imagine that – the teams that are trying to beat you every year are also sharing their ideas and expertise with you! Now THAT’S teamwork! Why would you want to knock other teams?

If we stop trying to micromanage the FIRST experience we’ll all have more fun and more success. Big picture – stop worrying about how other teams manage their affairs. Not to put too fine a point on it but it really isn’t any of your business anyway. When your team is absolutely perfect, then you can begin judging the others. And for crying out loud, HAVE FUN!

My 2 cents.

Sean

[Conor Ryan]

I've been on both sides of the tracks and heres my opinion on technical mentors.

Saying No to assistance that a technical mentor can provide is saying no to help. I'm trying not to make any religious connection but its saying no to a good Samaritan. Who is making them help you?

Well anyway I'm strongly in the opinion of never saying no to help, because in the end everyone benefits. You can ask any engineer thats assisted a team, they learn from the student too, so why say no to their education too.

FIRST stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, any I'm starting to believe that in order to be inspired, the closer you work with the mentors on your team the more inspired you would become. I wouldn't have the understanding I have today of mechanics and many other principals if it weren't for technical mentors that have been assisting me for over 4 years now, yes I've been lucky enough to of had mentors in middle school too. And I'm a living fact that mentors work.
__________________________________________________ ____________
However lets look at the advantages of a student built robot and compare?

Student Built
Pros:
-If something breaks you can fix it, you built it, you can repair it
-Team Pride
-Feeling that You've contributed something signifigant to the team
-Learned how to use the kit and potentially other items
Cons:
-Not the greatest track record (reliability issues are most common, I'm a design scout I have pictures and stacks of reports on it)
-Didn't get the optimal Engineering experince that could of happened

Student and Engineer Built
Pros:
-If something breaks, you can fix it. Why can't you?
-Team Pride
-Worked Side by side with real life engineers and got a better grasp of the engineering experince
-Generally the best track record available
-Contribution to the team
Cons:
-You didn't make every single part yourself (But is that really a disadvantage?)


edit:This is definetly not complete, so don't get angry

[sanddrag]

This year our team “borrowed” ideas from other teams (hey, sharing is a part of the spirit of FIRST, right?) and put them to use on our robot. One was a two-speed shift-on-the-fly transmission and the other was an omni wheel. Both were courtesy of Andy Baker and the Technokats. (Thanks Andy!) We did have our engineers and students do some tweaking to make them fit our needs but the fundamental ideas came from another team. And both worked phenomenally well; so much so that we finally won our first competition in our 9 year history. Sharing is the spirit of FIRST and I think we employed those resources well this year.This isn't exactly on topic but I think it is closely related enough that I'd like to add something as well. In 2004, we "borrowed" a gearbox design from a team in 2003. It was made nearly identical except for some very minor improvements. But what we learned out of the experience of building that thing was incredible! It set us off on the right track to make incredible gearboxes from then on, and even helped in obtaining a new sponsoring shop to help us manufacture the parts. I don't looks down upon anyone who builds another team's design as long as they can argue why it is fit for them and as long as they understand all the inner workings of it.

So anyway, I would say the best experience does not come from handing the students a box of parts and saying "have fun" and seeing what they come up with 6 weeks later. Some form of mentorship, even just reading published whitepapers, I think is crucial to success.

[Matt Leese]

Now that I'm back from Europe....

A long time ago I always thought the hardest part of starting a team was getting funding. Now, I think the hardest part is getting mentors. It isn't particularly hard to get a company to donate money but getting an individual to donate time is much harder; particularly the time commitment we're looking at.

The other key component of finding mentors is finding the right mentors. Not everyone is cut out to mentor high school students. For a rookie team, it's also quite helpful to find experienced mentors (which, for a rookie team, can be quite difficult).

So the question is, how do we recruit mentors (particularly those who are experienced) to go work with rookie teams? Most mentors who are working with team will not likely move to a new team without some large incentive (such as their child is on that team).

The only group that I know of that would be unattached to one particular team as well as having experience in FIRST would be college students. What we tried to do in Rochester (to some extent) this past year was to distribute the RIT FIRST college students to the various rookie (primarily) teams in the Rochester area. In many ways it worked but we were still short staffed most of the time.

As opposed to starting new college sponsored teams, I would think that using college students as mentors for other teams may be the best way to go. It helps to take a lot of the burden off of the college students (no need to run a team) and it may provide a greater service to the FIRST community.

Matt

[KenWittlief]

This isn't exactly on topic but I think it is closely related enough that I'd like to add something as well. In 2004, we "borrowed" a gearbox design from a team in 2003.....

In a way its more on topic than you realize.

Engineering and science are disciplines that build on the work that has been done in the past. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us.

When most people think of engineers the idea that pops into their head is some lone inventor, sitting in his basement, coming up with a new mousetrap or a better way to squeeze the last oz of toothpaste from a tube.

But in reality engineering is very different from the lone-inventor. There are methods and processes for tackling new problems, ways to break down a task (like coming up with a strategy for winning a game) - ways to think up new ideas, and ways to analyse those ideas and proceed with the best one.

And here's the thing, these methods and processes are not common sense things, not something you would think of on your own. As I alluded to previously, its taken over a hundred years of experience, trial and error, seat of the pants work to come up with these effecient ways of going from an initial problem to an idea, to a solution that can be built, operated and maintained.

Engineering is a profession. Can you imagine a program like FIRST in the medical field? Would you have HS students performing surgery on animals, with no medical training and no doctors on-hand to learn from? We dont need any doctor-mentors, we can do a heart transplant all by ourselves? The result would be certain death for the patient, and the students would be frustrated, disheartened and discouraged.

I cant think of any simplier way to put this: the intent of FIRST is to bring students and engineering professionals together. How can you take the professionals out of the equation?!

[Jack Jones]

We need to talk. …
Sometimes, this is the big white elephant in the corner that everyone wants to ignore...

I agree Andy. We need to talk about it because it’s more like an 800-pound gorilla sitting there waiting to tear a team apart, or at least to take all the fun out of it.

I also agree with Cory that, “the only thing that will be agreed on is ‘to each their own’”

So, here’s “my own” thoughts as to what this engineering mentor expects to give and gain from the FIRST experience.

For me it’s all defined by the FIRST acronym, with the key words being “Inspiration” and “Recognition”. Many here have stated that it’s all about inspiration. For me, however, it’s more recognition. I want the kids to learn something about what it takes to become an engineer. For them to recognize that they can’t wish, nor boast, nor suppose they know what it takes. I want them to show me they have the aptitude. I want them to know that on their first day, in their first engineering class, they can look to the person on either side and be assured that only one will still be sitting there on the last day of the term. I want them to know that on their first day on the job they will not be asked to form a group with all the other interns and then take a vote on the day’s engineering decisions. I want them to know that I’m not there to entertain them, or to raise their self-esteem, or to let them think for one minute that I can quietly sit back and watch them bollix things up. I want the kids I work with to be the ones who survive that first term and go on to become “real” engineers. On the other hand, I want the ones who twiddle their thumbs to go into something else. So, what I expect to give and gain are one in the same. That is to advance the state of my profession.

If the students, teachers, and parents already know what I’ve learned, then they don’t need me. If they just want someone to find sponsors, buy materials, arrange shop time, or put band-aid fixes on a job not well done, then I don’t need them.

I’d just like to add, before you all begin to take pity on Birmingham-Groves, that this year I was like the Maytag repairman. I never touched the electronics or the programming. I seldom visited the pits and never coached a lick. But that’s only because I had complete confidence in the machine, the plan, the kids, the teachers, and the parents; anything less and I would not been able to keep myself from taunting that 800-pound gorilla.

In my opinion, the right mix of student, mentor, and engineer involvement is when everyone gives it 100%.

[Alexander McGee]

I belong to one of these so-called "Student-Run" Teams. I am a mentor.

The reason that people get bent out of shape about this is that they thing the Engineers do all the work. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't (there are some really talented students in this program people). Regardless, some teams opt to have little or no adult involvement. As Andy stated, these teams generally do not "perform" well at the regional.

I think that the real problem here is everyone's definition of "performance". So what if the robot doesn't match up to the other ones? So what if there is something that was designed/built/engineered better than yours? Does this not inspire our students? Does it not make them want to do better the next year?

I think the real measure of a team is the number of students that it produces into the "Engineering field", and the number of scholarships that those students win. Who really remembers who won x-award at x-regional in 200x? What do these things really matter?

Some teams are set up differently than others. As long as there is still inspiration, to each his own.

[bhweezer]

Mr. Fava, a team mentor, says that with FIRST we get to "work alongside the Michael Jordans of the engineering field." FIRST is all about inspiration. Let the engineers inspire the students, and let the students inspire the engineers.

[Rich Kressly]

Baker, you're making my head hurt and it's only August!!!! :rolleyes:

Yes, balance seems ideal to me too Andy, yet inspiration happens on the individual level. In twelve years of teaching I've had more than a handful of rather humbling yet remarkable experiences. Old students coming back to visit telling me things that I did in the past, both positive and negative that either helped them or hurt them in the path toward their individual futures. Every time I have one of these experiences I get to learn all over again that the most difficult task of all is understanding what inspires each individual student. A single way of doing something will do wonders for one student, while it may stunt the growth of another.

Thus my answer lies in the "f" word - FLEXIBLE. What works one year, doesn't work the next. What works for one student, doesn't work for the next student. Students graduate, they mature, they change, new kids come in. At least once a year, in a perfect world, every team would reevaluate all of their strengths, weaknesses, and preferences for learning, and build a model for that year based on the current make up of the group and all of its individuals. The idea is to maximize the experience for everyone involved, including so called "grown-ups" and inspiring each and every student on the team.

Therefore, I submit that NO person or team should EVER look at another person or team and say, "It shouldn't be done that way." It's nearly impossible to know what works for every student on your own team. How on earth is it possible to know what works for someone else's?

My .02, now go back to work Andy and quit thinking of stuff that makes my head hurt in August.

[Andy Grady]

I think the answer to the question at hand is pretty cut and dry. Every student is inspired in different ways. In my opinion, as long as the competition gets the attention of someone and drags them in, it doesn't matter how they get there.

I've been fortunate enough to have been on multiple teams, each of which was run in a different manner. One team was highly student run, another was run mainly by engineers and teachers, and the last one had a good mix of both. My finding...the majority of students who walked away from the experience on any of the teams felt inspired in some way.

When I was a student in high school, I fell in love with the competition aspect of the game. My team at the time was a very competitive team and they focused heavily on the strategic aspect of FIRST. From that year forward I was hooked, always bringing my hunger for strategy and competition with me. When I changed teams as I became a mentor, we weren't quite as competitive as my previous team, but the results were the same. Everyone enjoyed themselves, this time because of the closeness that the design and build period brought between the students and the college mentors.

With FIRST...if the student cares, its a win win situation. As soon as you are caught up in the atmosphere, the drama, and the glory of it all...you are hooked, and thats pretty much it. Even those who dont stick around for 10+ years tend to look back on their experience as a life altering event. Thats what makes the program as a whole so important.

In closing, why search for the means when the end is more than adequate no matter what you do. The purpose of FIRST is served by just showing up.

-Andy Grady

[D.J. Fluck]

Dean & Woodie talk about teams having mentors.

men·tor Pronunciation Key (mntôr, -tr)
n. 1. A wise and trusted counselor or teacher.

The best teachers I had all through school taught the material they were supposed to teach, not let us read through a book and let us figure it out on their own. They were there to answer questions and make sure everyone understood the material. They also tried to make it fun and interesting as much as possible (we all know Economics isn't the most interesting subject to learn).

I feel a FIRST mentor should be the same way. They should teach the student their ways and their expertise and life skills (whether it is engineering or whatnot), show them that all aspects of a team should be fun, and should be interesting.

By taking away that aspect from a mentor on a team, they've become more of a secretary or a babysitter. I know that if I joined a team where my job as a "mentor" would be to clean up blood and kids cuts and just sit around and observe, I'd be pretty disappointed.

Sure, I can see how you would say each team is different, but as a mentor myself, I'd definitely would have a hard time accepting the fact that I wouldn't be able to help on a 100% student built machine.

Thats just my take on the matter.....

[mechanicalbrain]

Someone sent me a message (by the way this is a much better method than just repping people) that said my original post was angry and bordered on offensive to mentors and after rereading it while some things were fine they were right! :ahh: I apologize it was unbecoming and i wish to make a new stab at it and see if i can do a better job... but I'm too lazy and since i think the message i sent that person touches on everything i want to say anyways I'm just going to post a modified version of it. What I'm trying to imprint is that mentors should know when to step back and be mentors. I get discouraged when i go to competitions and see robots obviously designed by grownups. Also i like talking with teams and i find too little of the students at IFI know how the robot they built work. In one thread Ive seen this was placed into a question. "When does the competition become about mentor built robots Vs student built robots?" and its true i see to much mentor involvement on some teams (not all and some of you guys are very good at being mentors). And for every one of those robots i wonder how many ideas that while not initially the best idea could develop into something amazing by the students with encouragement from a mentor. Look at this from two different views. One the mentor who works hard to help the students even comes in out of work to do extra work. Its admirable and shows their devotion to the team and to helping out students. Now look at it from a student. The mentors help with with things that might have been overall better left to the kids especially if it would be a valuable learning experience (if your a mentor and your doing something for a team that you know how to do but your not teaching others than this might be one of those times). Also in the end a student looks at a robot and can see exactly what he did. Yes a student can say its cool but an they call it their own? Can they say exactly what their part is in its development and design? This doesn't just extend to mentors though. I'm an experienced student and because of that i catch myself falling into the same trap. Is this going to be "My" robot or the "Teams" robot. Yes they may go along with it because its a cool idea but what have they contributed to make it theirs also. The last thing i want is to offend mentors I'm trying to stress that maybe mentors should look at themselves and ask are they teachers or builders? I really don't want to belittle the mentors contributions, their great and i have lots of respect for them! Its just the pains of knowing things and trying to have everyone else reap the benefit. Well that was it slightly modified to this thread. I just think that mentors should take more of a passive role and try to more guide the students to get their invention working. Uh i guess this is it in a bottle (and applies to all people with knowledge) just because you know a better way IS it a better way? I know that this whole post isn't indicative of ALL mentors on FIRST teams and maybe you don't agree (you can indicate this with a message to me not reps please) but really look at all I'm saying and maybe evaluate the merit of what I'm saying and if you yourself have noticed similar things. I hope that was better and please recognize parts of my origional post could have been better thought out.

[AmyPrib]

I agree with the majority of people here already.... I feel a great way to achieve a well-run team is to have a good balance. The mentors must empower the students to design, build, lead, etc, and the students must be open to learning from the mentors, same as the mentors must be open to learning from students. It's a two-way street and I don't think you can logically argue that. There are some teams that have little to no mentors (or vice versa), but where there's a will, there's a way.. to recruit them... or recruit the help of other teams.

However, the key is defining.... what is inspiration... what is a mentor... what is an engineer... what is a teacher....what is winning...what is good performance....what is an award....what are your goals....what is FIRST about.... Everyone will have a variation to those definitions. So you are always going to have different opinions on what is the best way to run a team. The students will have one idea, the adults will have an idea... Hopefully those groups can come to an agreement. There must be give and take, but above all there must be learning on each side. Many times people have said "inspiration is letting the students do all the work and learn from their failures", while others have said "inspiration is leading by example, teaching students fundamental skills to carry thru the future". I think.. it's BOTH.

I honestly don't feel anyone can realistically say "a student-run team is better" or a "mentor-run team is better". If a student on a student-run team says "a student run team is best way", that implies they know everything (aka "we don't need mentors for anything, they cause more harm than good"). If a mentor says it about a mentor-run team, same implication, and I think that's ludicrous. The students have next to zero "professional" work or real-world experience, and I feel they need someone who does to be effective. But that's not to say adults know everything either - they learn from the creativity and "unconditioned" or "out of the box" ideas from students.

There are positive aspects to all 3 ways of running a team, but personally I feel there are only negative aspects in purely student-run, or mentor-run. (I'm not saying either are terrible, I'm saying there are some negatives to it and most of them are obvious)... The difficult part about a "well-balanced" team is: maintaining the balance between the sides.

So, that's what I think. If there are disagreements within the team about how to run it, then perhaps a team evaluation of your definitions of the above words is in order.

[phrontist]

I will admit I don't have an answer. But something seems very wrong to me when I walk into a pit and ask a student about part X only to hear that the brilliant part X was designed by a professional engineer. He/She's a professional, what pride could they possibly get from trouncing a bunch of student designed robots? It's like Michael Jordan going down to the YMCA for a pickup game, joining a team, and totally dominating the other teams. How the hell would that help the kids on his team? Is it okay for Michael Jordan to go down to the Y and help kids work on their jump shots? Sure! Is it okay for a professional engineer to teach kids about practical design considerations in designing a gearbox? Of course! I think you see where I'm going with this.

To keep with the sports star analogy: Imagine if a bunch of star basketball players each adopted a team of aspiring young athletes. Then they held a big competition. I'm sure it would be inspiring to play with a sports star, but you wouldn't be doing much, would you? It would just be mentor on mentor.

What a lot of people fail to realize is that a lot of schools have a lot of inspired students already, students who walk in the first day and have known for a long time they want to be engineers/physicists/mathematicans/etc. For schools like that, maybe the Recognition is of greater importance. Other students can certainly be inspired by the nerdy ones, no?

My team currently has no engineering mentors, but I'm actively changing that. One of the FIRST things I'll do though is make clear that we are not looking for an engineer to design are robot for us so we can gaze over his/her shoulder in silent awe, then do menial tasks at there direction. I'm not sure how an engineer does fit into our team yet, by I'm sure will figure it out.

I aplogize, this is not my usual writing style, it's much more off the cuff than usual, as this is an issue which I harbor very strong opinions on.

You may now mod me down, thank you for reading.

[Philip W.]

The bottomline is that we're fulfilling FIRST's ideals of inspiring youths to consider careers in science and technology and changing today's outlook in these fields. It doesn't matter if a robot is built and designed 100% by engineers and is the best on the field, or bulit and designed 100% by students and is the worst on the field, or even a combination of the two, as long as the students are inspired.

I've heard this one being reiterated in the FIRST community too many times now and I'm sure inspiration is happening in every FIRST team out there, but has anyone ever considered to take it a step further? I sure have. Instead of letting FIRST simply encourage youths to take on jobs of science and technology, why don't you make it a personal or team goal to produce the leaders of tomorrow? If not the leaders, at least the geniuses of tomorrow. Besides, FIRST isn't only about inspiration, FIRST is also about providing opportunities of enrichment. I'm the taking this opportunity, generously provided by FIRST (and my mentors and teammates, of course), to rise to the top.

Every team is unique, thus, the solution will always be dependant on the team.*sigh* I've heard this one too many times as well. Not that I'm trying to offend anyone, but this sort of thinking doesn't get us very far. What we need are details. "A good balance of...this-that-this" really isn't good enough either I'm afraid. To find a better answer, let us remind ourselves the question at hand.


Dare I ask... Which "team" is better? What defines "better"?

Keeping in mind that FIRST is out there for the kids, I will firmly say that the student run team is better. Let's be unrealistic for a second. The perfect team would definitely be student run, but will still have mentors supporting and acting as a security blanket in case the students make a big mistake, which they won't if they have earned the responsibility of managing a small business that we would usually call a FIRST robotics team. Mentors will have to be deprived of involvement, but in replacement of that fun is an abundant warm fuzzy feeling. Of course, for this team to be perfect, they would have to be a successful one in competition, therefore having bright and capable students not only in managing team, but also engineering a competitive robot. The perfect team will also be capable of winning every FRC award available and spread the word of FIRST as if it was the plague. Just perfect.

Now, to stop daydreaming. It'll be a while before the perfect team comes along (I won't shoot down the possibility), but the more your team is similar to this one, the closer you will be to achieving this dream.

Unfortunately, what we usually see today are excellent engineer-built robots or not-so-great student-built robots. Between these two types of robots (not considering the existence of excellent student-built robots), not-so-great student-built robots still make the "better" team for FIRST's sake. These are the students that will more likely the geniuses of tomorrow. But we have to remember that engineer-built teams are still good teams for inspiring the students.

Just because a robot is 100% student-built, doesn't mean mentors and engineers still can't help. We must remember that mentors should only be teaching. If mentors keep to teaching students the design process and how to use a machine and etc., and ensure the students are productive, all that is needed from the students is a creative mind and a willingness to work to have an excellent competitive robot.

I am not leaving out the fact that some teams cannot be easily student run or have a student built robot if the students aren't willing, that some students may be too independant to ask for mentor support, that mentors can't help but join the fun and other facts, I am simply directly answering the debate question.

[sciguy125]

I think that the roles of mentors ultimately depend on what the team wants to gain by participating in FIRST. We seem to have two followings in our team. 1351's leadership seems to have been pushing us toward engineering. They want the team to learn about science, engineering, and technology. Having fun is a second priority. However, there are some that want the team to be something "fun". They want to be here to be with friends and play with a cool robot, making learning a lower priority. With the current leadership soon to be changed, we may change our direction to the latter, depending on how things play out. I'm not saying that you can't generally have fun while you learn and vice versa, just that different people have prioritized them differently. In certain situations, however, you will have to pick whether you want to have fun or you want to learn, with very little middle ground. In those situations, people will go with whichever they want more. Having said that, I'd like to discuss mentors.

To the engineering folk who want to learn, mentors are best suited to teaching. The students get to fumble around a little, but still get help from mentors when they need it. I've found that you can never truly learn something until you do it. I can sit here and tell you everything you need to know about programming, but until you try it, you'll never actually understand how to do it. For instance, you may try to do something that may cause a problem. I never actually told you not to do it, however, because it seemed obvious to me. Everyone has different levels of expertise and has had different experiences in their lives. Until you try something for yourself, you'll never truly be prepared for it.

To those that want to have fun, more mentor involvement would be better. The students can focus less on try to learn how everything works and spend more time playing with everything. The kit comes with enough parts and instructions to make a functional robot, though not that spectacular. For some, that may be enough. They get to spend time with their friends and do something together, but not get caught up with the boring book learning. The mentors, depending on the exact situation, may have to pick up the slack that the students don't really want to take care of themselves.

As another example to my point, my friend does battlebots. He tried to get me into it also, but I just didn't like it. He is a mechanical person and I'm an electronics person. He has fun building the robot. He likes to cut the metal and weld it together. He loves doing the math to show that his robot could probably beat up a car. He doesn't care, however, how the electronics work. He works with the black box mentality. Boxes A and B are connected together using wire C. It doesn't matter how they work as long as they do. As for me, I can care less about the mechanical aspect of it (but battlebots is more geared toward it, which is why I didn't like it). I have more fun programming and designing the electronics. If I had someone to build the chassis, I could spend all the time I want playing with my new mobile electronics platform of doom. My friend, however, would want the opposite.

Now I'm not saying that you should decide your mentor involvement on whether or not you want to have fun or want to learn. I'm also not saying that my opinions are the best way to handle the situations presented. I'm just posing these as examples. Your team may have totally different priorities, or they may just be finer striations of the points that I brought up. Maybe your team wants to prepare students for industry. In that case, you'd need more mentor involvement to teach them how things are done. Maybe your team just wants to give students general engineering knowledge and skills. In this case, less involvement may be better. If you're looking for a way to hang out, parents (depending on how you feel about your family) may be better because now it's a family event.

In the end, your team needs to sit down and decide where you want FIRST to take you. Once you know where you want to go, you can decide how you want to get there.

[techtiger1]

Mr.Baker and Sciguy may I say excellent posts and topic to bring up I like it. In my opinion FIRST teams need as many mentors in the technical fields as possible. People like Mr.Baker (45) and Raul from 111 are the very essence of FIRST the reason why it works so well. The robots without mentors would be boring and the kids would have no one to look up to and no one to guide them in building it. I know that on 1251 without our engineering and various other mentors we would not be able to make our robots and things we deisgn a reality. I think the engineering mentorship piece is critical to a team it shows them what the real world is like and how to deal with problems. Mentors are great I think the fact that they take so much time out and design with the kids really amazing robots is fantasic thanks to all of you out there.

My two cents,
-Drew

[dubious elise]

In my mind, can a engineer design something on a robot and be proud of that design? You bet.
I could not agree more with that statement. In 2004, we got ourselves in to a bit of a jam trying to figure out how to hook onto the bar effectively and without taking up too much weight. A mentor that had just recently "joined forces" with our team took our problem and began brainstorming designs with a group of kids. In the end, we came out with a lengthy, strong, aluminum arm that helped us to win the Midwest Regional (of course, with the help of your team, Andy, and team 930!). That mentor was so proud of the creation that he has offered, on multiple occasions, to take the arm back if we ever (heaven forbid) scrap the robot so that he could hang it over his fireplace like a prizewinning muskie.

Of course, mentors are necessary to help a team function. I could not imagine having students doing everything from booking hotels to packing meals to welding the frames perfectly square to wiring the robot perfectly the very first time. As much as I hate to admit it, FIRST just isn't that simple. And of course, as many have said, mentors are there to help, not to hoard.

When someone tells me the word "mentor" I think of someone who will be there to teach me, and then watch over my shoulder when I am building cool things. If it is not possible for me to design or machine a part, or code certain section, then the mentor take over and solve the problems. I have seen many teams work like that. The students love it, because they get the best out of the program.
To build on Arefin's quote, mentors can also be there learning alongside the students. Every year, just working on strategic puzzles to simplify each game helps tremendously. Mentors don't frequently have experience in this area, so students and adults are on a very level playing field. For this year's game, we made up red and blue cards to fit onto squares on a 3x3 board (like the field!) and we would have 20 second "matches" between mentors and students alike to see who could place the squares in the best patterns on the field. Even though our robot wasn't as fast at stacking as we had been about laying down cards, we learned some crucial strategy-oriented maneuvers that helped us to win a number of matches.

[Ryan Foley]

I think D.J. Fluck's spotlighted post sums this up well

"I don't understand why it should matter if your robot is 100% student built, 100% engineer built or somewhere in between. As long as you are Inspired (I word again) FIRST is getting its point and primary goal across."

I agree with this almost fully. If 100% student built gets the kids inspired, go with that, if 100% engineer built works well, do it. However, personal experiences lead me to prefer a mix of students and engineers.

My freshman year, the bot was completely built by the engineers. I personally didnt find this inspiring or fun, perhaps if they had let us watch what they were doing and they explained what was going on and why, it would have been a more positiv experience. Then, in 2004, it was 100% students. I thought it was the best set up, and that we were better than the other teams because we didnt need engineers.

Now, after taking a year off and watching, I wish that I had the oppurtunity to work with engineers in FIRST. I think that having the chance to work alongside engineers is an incredible oppurtunity that high school (and even college students) can learn a lot from. And I agree with Elise, the mentors can learn from the students. Remember Dave Lavery's story of Colin Angle and Tooth the robot at JPL/ NASA?

Also, to answer the title question of the thread, sometimes teams just can't get technical mentors to join them. Sometimes the more rural teams have no companies close enough to them that could provide engineering support. Or maybe the team is surrounded by companies, but none have the time or enough people to spare to devote to the robotics team. So it's not that all teams are voluntarily choosing not to have engineering assistance.

[nehalita]

I really love this thread because it reminds me how wonderful FIRST is. We see so many opinions here yet everyone seems to work according to their own needs. There is no "way" and we all get to bask in the ability to choose how to run our teams.

Alot of people mentioned here how some teams "do not realize" how involved a team could be. This could not be closer to true. I am living proof. When I started FIRST, I was astonished to see so many adults at the competition. I thought all teams, like ours, was student run, student built, etc. Thus, I had the image that this was the "only way to go." After mingling with other teams and through chiefdelphi, i've realized how many different teams and levels and interactions there are. I had NO idea!

This year would be our third year competing. Our team consists of probably 10 dedicated students and two VERY dedicated teachers. We don't even have a real "sponsor" -- alot of our money comes from relations that will give one time and move on (and the majority comes from us). But, we are desperately trying to change this. We are trying to find a sponsor, trying to get more students involved and trying to find an engineer to help us. After two years of trying, we haven't given up...maybe this year will be our lucky break.

What i'm trying to show here is that alot of teams don't have a choice. However, imagining that we had an engineer, I think it would help our spirit, competitive edge, and overall experience.

No doubt, we take pride in our self-reliability. When we run into problems, we sit and figure out what to do -- we engage in this process to its fullest extent without having someone on the end cut us short with the answer. But it's been hard. We had no machining tools (that should change this year) in the past and the majority of our robot was built with a drill, a hammer and saws. And given what we had, I feel take pride our progress.

Most of all, I want to point out that our two mentors, the teachers in my school that have taught me mathematics, engineering and CAD and that I see everyday (literally, except for sundays and holidays), have gotten us this far. No, we had no engineers but we had two dedicated mentors that were willing to put their heads together with us, treat us as equals, and engage in the "engineering process." We all are human, we all learn, we all interact. So why not promote the interaction? Every team needs a mentor to push them in some sort of way -- so, the more the merrier.

[Ryan F.]

I'll bite.


These teams get awards for their student involvement.
I was told by judges at the Midwest Regional that they were specifically told to not account for amount of student involvement in determining awards.

Are both teams learning? yes.
NO.

I realize there are no absolutes here, but what I have seen has appalled me. I've witnessed an engineer on a team with an obviously professionally designed robot yelling at one of his pit crew about how he was “stupid" for the way he was trying to fix something, then push him out of the way and do it himself. Witnessing things like this make me VERY thankful I am on a team with high student involvement.

When you see the pits of these teams at regionals, It seems like the kids are standing around when the engineers do all the work. People learn from doing something, not watching someone else do it.


We see teams who are proud about having a "100% designed and built robot". I can respect this. They worked hard. They learned much. However, more likely than not, they performed not so well at a regional.

They may have professional machine designers creating gearboxes or writing code.
Here’s the big problem. How are high schoolers supposed to compete against professionally designed and built robots? This is where the true conflict is. The teams who believe that FIRST is better when the students actually build and manage the robot get destroyed in competition. FIRST is not supposed to be a professional engineering competition. If the engineering mentors want that, there are other avenues. FIRST is meant to Inspire the STUDENTS. The more we allow for these professionally designed and built robots to dominate the FIRST competitions, the more it encourages student run teams to start letting the engineers design and build the robots. FIRST will start to discourage many teams from participating when they realize that the robot they spent six weeks on has no chance of success at the competition.

[TimCraig]

I mentor a FIRST team because I think building the robots is fascintating, I have time to do it, and I think it's never too late to have a happy childhood.

FIRST teams vary all over the map. The high school where my team is has eliminated all vocational programs. Although we're in the heart of Silicon Valley, most of the students in the club don't seem really passionate about technology. If it wasn't for my efforts, I'm afraid a robot wouldn't get built for the competition in the last 3 years the team has been in existence.

I've thought about standing back and letting the team fail to deliver a robot much less a competitive robot. It's hard to separate the student's failure from mine in this instance. When I work on something, I expect excellance. When the robot is finished, it's handed over to the students for competition and I have no control over the outcome of the competition. I've told my students the one thing I can control is the "ooh and ahh" factor when people look at our robot. I take pride in what we build no matter how it finishes in the competition.

If the students in the club learn something from being around me and how I proceed at robot building, then I'm happy but that is largely up to them. I'm not a teacher. I'm not paid to spoon feed them or keep them entertained. I'm a mentor. I'm there to show them how the real world approaches problems, attacks them, and solves them.

The first year I was involved with FIRST I tried to stand back and wait for a "student designed and built" robot with me acting as a consultant. Three weeks into the build, there was absolutely nothing to show for the effort and we were lucky that Stack Attack was a relatively simple game so we managed to field a robot that by virtue of being reliable, was competitive. The team who had sponsored us as our mentor didn't really provide much support.

FIRST teams are organizations that have great turnover. The longest a student will be on the team is 4 years. Continuity is big factor of the mentors being available to carry the knowledge forward. Ideally, this knowledge would be passed from experienced students to less experienced students. While some of that happens on my team, it's not how I see the major knowledge transfer.

PS. If any of my students read this, please tell me. While I've pushed that Chief Delphi is a valuable site, I suspect that none of you visit here regularly if at all.

[Cory]

Are both teams learning? yes.

NO.

How do you know? The answer is you don't.

I realize there are no absolutes here, but what I have seen has appalled me. I've witnessed an engineer on a team with an obviously professionally designed robot yelling at one of his pit crew about how he was “stupid" for the way he was trying to fix something, then push him out of the way and do it himself. Witnessing things like this make me VERY thankful I am on a team with high student involvement.

Why is it that if a robot looks good it's automatically made by only engineers? This is a common misconception, and if I were a student who had a hand in a professional design, I'd be insulted.

When you see the pits of these teams at regionals, It seems like the kids are standing around when the engineers do all the work. People learn from doing something, not watching someone else do it.


FIRST will start to discourage many teams from participating when they realize that the robot they spent six weeks on has no chance of success at the competition. [/U]

FIRST isn't about the competition. Dean has said it isn't, and won't be fair. The competition is a means to an end. How can you possibly characterize what inspires a student by what inspires you? the answer, as I said before, is you can't.

Also, until you've worked with a team, or spent an extensive amount of time around them, do not make ignorant claims about how their team is ran. You have no idea what they have or haven't done, and you have no right to demean their work. It's not up to others to police mentor involvement on a team. It's up to the students. If they feel like they don't have enough involvement, THEY need to fix that, likewise if they feel that they have too much involvement, they need to get mentors into the game.

$0.02

[mechanicalbrain]

Also, until you've worked with a team, or spent an extensive amount of time around them, do not make ignorant claims about how their team is ran. You have no idea what they have or haven't done, and you have no right to demean their work. It's not up to others to police mentor involvement on a team. It's up to the students. If they feel like they don't have enough involvement, THEY need to fix that, likewise if they feel that they have too much involvement, they need to get mentors into the game.

$0.02
Well thats a little more than two cents. Maybe he has and he's referring to personal experience as well or maybe he's talking about a friends personal experience. My major concern about this thread is watching it getting nippy replies which is why i went back and reposted my own original statement. Anyhew give him a chance maybe he has ground to stand on! Same goes to Ryan, it's fine to express an idea but do it in a way that others will give your message a chance. This needs to be a discussion of ideas and whether or not we agree with ideas we should still respect peoples right to have them and express them. How else can we change our own beliefs and evolve as engineers as well as people?

[KathieK]

My experience is with a team which has had a large number of mentors working with the students over the last several years. These mentors included engineers, teachers, college students and other adults from all kinds of vocational backgrounds. While nothing is perfect, and the team dynamics change from season to season, I like to think that exposing the students to working with adults other than teachers (whom they normally have contact with on a daily basis during the school year) is advantageous. Not all of the students are planning to become scientists or engineers so exposure to other professional skills is a good thing. Because the team had grown to larger numbers and had mentoring and other support, it allowed the team to expand to include additional things like community involvement, which in turn brings in more media attention, which in turn attracts more potential sponsors and spreads the word of FIRST. Adults have networked and have more connections than the average high school student simply because we're out in the workplace and we've met a lot of people. Managing the paperwork and scheduling the school board meetings for a team with students from multiple high schools is an administrative nightmare that most students don't want to deal with, but some adults may have the professional skills to do it efficiently (and are more than willing to explain it to the students, if any were ever interested in learning about it). I think an effective mentor is one who encourages student ideas, listens to them, then offers an opinion or guidance based on professional expertise.

[GeorgeTheEng]

There are 2 more things I would like to add to this topic. The first leads into the second.

At our school, there are no classes in programming of any kind. The closest they come is a web design class and html is nothing like C. That being said, it falls on me to teach the kids what they need to know. Last year we only go one 4 hour session to go over programming prior to the season. Not enough for the kids to understand it well enough. So did I do the actual programming, yes. But I tried to do it in such a way that they students were involved and understood something. As much as possible, I hooked my laptop up to a projector and worked on the code with the kids. Explaining the decision process and having them help determine how it was going to work. Is that "having the students do it" No, I admit that. My goal this year is to make another step in that direction. Did the students learn? I beleive so. The indiciated to me that they learned something. Sometimes what the mentor has to or doesn't have to do is a product of the environment and what kind of team they are on. (though the goal should always be to improve the students skills, thought processes, and experiences)

That being said, even though I am a professional programmer, I do not work on a daily basis with anything similar to stuff we do on the robot. I work on PC-based simulators that simulate the interfaces between military systems. I don't work with microprocessors directly, I don't have to deal with interrupts, setting pins, or worrying about memory space. To me, the whole robotics experience is a stretch and something new. So while a lot of us have degrees in engineering, I'd claim that the only real "professionals" are one who work with this type of stuff all the time. I think most of us would really be in the experienced amatuer category.

[phrontist]

The more we allow for these professionally designed and built robots to dominate the FIRST competitions, the more it encourages student run teams to start letting the engineers design and build the robots. FIRST will start to discourage many teams from participating when they realize that the robot they spent six weeks on has no chance of success at the competition.

I have to agree with Ryan. People are always clamoring "it's not about the competition", but frankly, for a huge number of students, and certainly to the public, it is most certainly about the competition. If we don't have a competition, we don't have any vehicle with which to inspire. If we don't have a fair competition, it will quickly degrade into a sham.

One of the more uncomfortable, and seemingly inevitable moments of explaining first to an outsider is the inevitable prompt, "Are all these robots student built?", to which I haven't found a good response. The honest answer would be no, but how do you justify the program in light of that?

FIRST isn't about the competition. Dean has said it isn't, and won't be fair. The competition is a means to an end.

An unfair competition is no competition at all. The organization is larger than Dean, and if it is to survive, it must, like all organizations, change.

Also, until you've worked with a team, or spent an extensive amount of time around them, do not make ignorant claims about how their team is ran. You have no idea what they have or haven't done, and you have no right to demean their work. It's not up to others to police mentor involvement on a team. It's up to the students. If they feel like they don't have enough involvement, THEY need to fix that, likewise if they feel that they have too much involvement, they need to get mentors into the game.

Ack! "How their team is run"! You are right, it is impracticle to police mentor involvement, but we can develop a culture in which it is completely unacceptable, and peer pressure will take over.

In FIRST, entirely Engineer built robots are an abomination. There is significant reason to be proud of the degree to which your robot is student designed (built is less important, I find, because real engineers may never pick up a spanner).

[Adrienne E.]

Sometimes what the mentor has to or doesn't have to do is a product of the environment and what kind of team they are on. (though the goal should always be to improve the students skills, thought processes, and experiences)

This to me sums up my thoughts on this issue. A reoccurring debate on our team has always been, if there are no high school students interested in doing a task (wiring, programming, chairmans, animation, or anything on the team) then what? I think this is why some teams need mentors to step in and either create interest in a field such as programming where none of the students would get exposure to it otherwise, or just get things done. I guess I just don't see the harm in a mentor programming the robot if every single high school student on the team wants to do the mechanical things. I think (as many others have said here) the mentors are a key part of the FIRST program. The fact that high school students get to work side by side with real engineers is one of the things that makes this program special and different from all the other engineering competitions out there.

[Joe Lambie]

You know Andy; I am still amazed by the things that come out of your brain. This one has got me stumped.

For a number of years, and to a large extent still I am very much in the boat of wanting the students to do the majority of the design and manufacture work. Mentors I believe should be providing expertise and guidance (along with travel arrangements, money management and so on). From having the experiences I had in FIRST, I personally got so much more out of “doing” things then I would ever have gotten by just watching and listening. However, it was also a great opportunity to work alongside and with engineers, and learn from their years of experience. Often this was a great asset to our team, with young, creative, and crazy-minded students providing a fresh look at how things can be done along with the voice of experience in our engineering mentors letting us know when perhaps we were just a little too crazy.

Now this is not to say that teams in which students provide less engineering and manufacture work are not as inspired. In fact, some may be inspired to ask why an engineer chooses to design and manufacture a half-inch shaft over a 3/8ths shaft, while another may be inspired to learn how to manufacture it. They did not need to be in the shop or design room to be inspired, but merely see how exciting the world of engineering and science can be, and then have the drive and initiative to go out and find the answers as well.

Who knows, maybe someday Student A from Team XX, which was student run, may work in the same company as Student B from Team XXX whose team was mostly engineer run. Both these people have very different experiences in engineering, Student A may have an insight into the manufacture of parts and a sense of what can be done to simplify the creation of parts and therefore lower cost, while Student B may have an incredible sense of design and a fantastic handle on the fundamentals of machine design. By putting the two together, you have twice as much brainpower and expertise at work on a real world problem, both able to point out specific concerns from both sides of the engineering world of design and manufacture. As a result, you could get a better design, that is simpler to make, and safer to operate, while saving money. What more could any company ask for?

Ultimately every human is different, thankfully. If we were not all different I imagine we could be sitting and staring at the wheel sitting next to the fire in awe of how great the two are. Instead, we have traveled to the moon, and someday we will travel to Mars and beyond.

I propose a different view of the issue at hand. It is not so much of how the team is run, be it by students or engineers or a combination there of, but how each student learns and is inspired. Ultimately the students are the drivers behind this competition, for without them Dean and Woody would have a great idea, but not a whole lot of progress. The students need to ask questions if they are inspired by something they see, and the mentors need to be sure to answer them to the best of their ability. Remember though, it’s always fun to get your hands dirty once in awhile too.

[Carol]

When you see the pits of these teams at regionals, It seems like the kids are standing around when the engineers do all the work.
[/U]

I think it's very easy to misunderstand what is happening when you walk past a pit and "see" incidents like the above. Let me propose a theoretical scenario. Your students have participated in the design and building of your robot all year, working along side of and learning from the mentors. Now your team is at the Championship, and something breaks on your robot in your last match. Your next match is in 1 hour. It would take 2 hours for the students to fix it and 30 minutes for the engineers to fix it. Your best student mechanic is also the driver, and is meeting with the operating team to determine strategy for your next match. Who should fix your robot?

[KenWittlief]

I have to agree with Ryan. People are always clamoring "it's not about the competition", but frankly, for a huge number of students, and certainly to the public, it is most certainly about the competition. If we don't have a competition, we don't have any vehicle with which to inspire. If we don't have a fair competition, it will quickly degrade into a sham.

...

An unfair competition is no competition at all. The organization is larger than Dean, and if it is to survive, it must, like all organizations, change.


FIRST has grown from an initial 32 teams to over a thousand, has thrived for over a decade, and you are telling us the person who founded this program, and put his life-force behind it for all these years got it wrong?

Seriously?

If FIRST was primarilly a robot building contest, then the major funding for it would evaporate overnight. Turn FIRST into battlebots, where winning is the thing, then what is the point?

I could not possibly care less which high school or which company can build the best robot in the US, or in the world. I do care about my profession: engineering. I do want to see more students take up the challenge of completing an engineering degree and helping to do what the rest of my profession does: making peoples lives better.

If a team has to win to be successful, then at the end of each year you will have 3 successful teams and 997 losers.

[KenWittlief]

I think it's very easy to misunderstand what is happening when you walk past a pit and "see" incidents like the above.

I would also add, on our team we joked around alot. Whenever a student made a mistake we would look them in the eyes and say "YOUR FIRED"

and they would do the same to us - it was a game to lighten the air when someone screwed up - and the joke was: none of us were getting paid anyway.

Usually when you see mentors totally dominating the students, and even (actually) yelling at them, its their first year, and they dont 'get it' yet.

[phrontist]

An unfair competition is no competition at all. The organization is larger than Dean, and if it is to survive, it must, like all organizations, change.


FIRST has grown from an initial 32 teams to over a thousand, has thrived for over a decade, and you are telling us the person who founded this program, and put his life-force behind it for all these years got it wrong?

Seriously?


No, I do not believe I ever said that his origional goal was wrong, and if that was the message sent, it certainly wasn't intended. What I do believe, however, is that I disagree with certain elements of the implementation of his "change the culture" master plan. These issues are fairly minor. None the less, I think people should arrive at their own conclusions, instead of following the messiah in denim unquestioningly. Don't get me wrong, I think he's brilliant, but no one is right all the time.


If FIRST was primarilly a robot building contest, then the major funding for it would evaporate overnight. Turn FIRST into battlebots, where winning is the thing, then what is the point?


I'm sorry, but yes, FIRST is a robot building contest. My team is sponsored by people who want to give young people interested in engineering a chance to do some actual engineering while still in highschool. Furthermore, we try to get other students who would not otherwise be interested involved.
[/QUOTE]


I could not possibly care less which high school or which company can build the best robot in the US, or in the world. I do care about my profession: engineering. I do want to see more students take up the challenge of completing an engineering degree and helping to do what the rest of my profession does: making peoples lives better.

If a team has to win to be successful, then at the end of each year you will have 3 successful teams and 997 losers.

No, my team does not have to win to be successful. We do, however, need to compete, and do so with integrity, which for me at least means attemting to build student designs.

Competition serves an important purpose, it serves to focus our efforts.

[Beth Sweet]

"FIRST will start to discourage many teams from participating when they realize that the robot they spent six weeks on has no chance of success at the competition" ~Ryan F

As much as I hate to full out disagree with you and say you're wrong, you are. My kids came to competition this year with a robot that was... um, not the most competitive at the competition. The first practice match, the entire gripper fell apart. Luckily for us, a team with more engineers and resources was able to help us out and provide us with a well designed and very functional replacement. Did this discourage my kids? Well of course they wished they could be the best, who doesn't? I mean, in any given competition, there is a best, and everyone in the given lower ranks, wants to be that best team. Here's a hint, just because you don't win doesn't mean it's not still fun.

As to the topic of balance which has been thoroughly discussed, I'm going to go devil's advocate on this one. Guess what? All of these teams that say they're 100% student built, designed etc, are not. Who do you think designed everything in the kit of parts? I can pretty much guarantee you it wasn't a high school student. So yes, you have had engineer help. Really, it's not so bad, I promise.

Why would you do it without adult technical mentors? (and btw, in this post, college kids will count as adults, even though some people say that there is still a need for real adults) Well, possibly because you have none available. I know that we looked endlessly for anyone to help mentor our team. We had 1 engineering major in our mentor team last year. The rest just knew from being on their high school teams. I understand that it's not ideal, but sometimes you just can't get adult technical mentors. We've been trying to get into GM (the closest place that would have them) for almost a year now. I'm still waiting to get ahold of anyone inside of the Lansing plant.

Why would you do it? To make things happen with what you have. Sometimes it's just not available. I've had a few people tell me that since I didn't have them that I shouldn't have started a team. I think my kids still had a great time, and want to come back again next year, so I don't see the problem. The kids learned. The mentors learned. Yes, we weren't as good as the best teams, there are only so many "best team" spots available.

Overall point to those that don't want to read the rest of this post's babble: Whether or not your team has the technical mentors, as long as your kids are still inspired by the adult technical mentors of other teams, and get the picture that we're trying to portray in this program, the best that you can to is the best you can do. Do it, and be proud of your results

[Andy Baker]

I realize there are no absolutes here, but what I have seen has appalled me. I've witnessed an engineer on a team with an obviously professionally designed robot yelling at one of his pit crew about how he was “stupid" for the way he was trying to fix something, then push him out of the way and do it himself. Witnessing things like this make me VERY thankful I am on a team with high student involvement.

Here’s the big problem. How are high schoolers supposed to compete against professionally designed and built robots? This is where the true conflict is. The teams who believe that FIRST is better when the students actually build and manage the robot get destroyed in competition. FIRST is not supposed to be a professional engineering competition. FIRST is meant to Inspire the STUDENTS. The more we allow for these professionally designed and built robots to dominate the FIRST competitions, the more it encourages student run teams to start letting the engineers design and build the robots. FIRST will start to discourage many teams from participating when they realize that the robot they spent six weeks on has no chance of success at the competition.

I don't doubt that you saw a mentor do something stupid. Surely, that was unfortuneate. For every example of a poor mentoring moment, I can think of 10 positive mentoring moments. No mentor is perfect. Don't make this one bad example outweigh the hundreds of great relationships that FIRST engineers have with students.

I definitely don't agree with your logic. In FIRST, high schoolers are supposed to partner up with professionals (engineers, skilled tradesmen, business leaders, etc.) and compete against other teams. This program is more about that partnership, and less about students being educated. This is not a science fair.

You say "FIRST is meant to Inspire the STUDENTS." You are right. However, you seem to be missing the point that these professionals are doing much inspiring. It is a two way street, in my opinion. If this was just a student robot building contest, the level of inspiration we see would not be present. Seriously... we would have no swerve drives, no shift on the fly gearboxes, no object-oriented autonomous programming, no WFA winners, no IRI, no Battlecry, no WRRF. We would not be playing in the Georgia Dome, there would be no students getting Segway riding lessons at FIRST competitions.

One of the more uncomfortable, and seemingly inevitable moments of explaining first to an outsider is the inevitable prompt, "Are all these robots student built?", to which I haven't found a good response. The honest answer would be no, but how do you justify the program in light of that?

Here is a good response: "Heck no!... these are NOT all student-built! That is not what this program is about. FIRST is about a partnership between students, engineers, teachers, and their communities. This partnership is what makes FIRST special. The fact that these professional engineers, college students and skilled tradesmen are working side by side with the students define what the 'Inspiration' is in FIRST. This is not a VICA tournament or a Science Fair. It is special. This is what is changing the educational culture in our community."

In FIRST, entirely Engineer built robots are an abomination. There is significant reason to be proud of the degree to which your robot is student designed (built is less important, I find, because real engineers may never pick up a spanner).

You are right that there is a significant reason to be proud of a student designed robot. It is great to see this. If students can design a robot, then this program is working. HOWEVER, to say that an engineer-built (and/or designed) robot is an abomination is insulting, short-sighted, and wrong, in my opinion. Students can still be inspired to SEE how something is designed and built. There have been Chairman's Award teams who have had engineers do much of the design and build of the robot. This is not a bad thing. The team celebrated their engineers, and their level of student inspiration. Your statement insults these teams.

As long as I am still involved in FIRST, I will fight to keep it to be a partnership between students and adults, working side by side to build these robots.

Andy B.

[KenWittlief]

Beth, I agree with your post

the question of this thread is more geared towards asking why some student run teams actually shun professional help

if you try to get engineers on your team, but you cant find one, thats one thing

but there are teams out there that have the attitude "we dont need (or want) any engineers, we can do this all by ourselves"

[phrontist]

I see absolutely no value in an entirely engineer built robot. Is that really so insulting? I mean, if the students just watch the engineer do brilliant things, they might as well read a book about great innovators. I really do not mean to be insulting, I have immense respect for every F.I.R.S.T. mentor I've ever met, but for the purposes of arguement I'm talking about a hypothetical extreme: an entirely engineer/mentor built robot, something I consider to be indicative of a terrible state of affairs. It could probably never happen in the real world, I said it merely to illustrate the worst case scenario. The closer you get to that worst case scenario, the worse off you are. The flip side of the coin isn't good either: purposely shunning any engineer involvement is contrary to the spirit of F.I.R.S.T. It's about balance, and if you are going to be off-kilter, I think it better to be off kilter on the lack-of-engineer involvement side of things. But why be off-kilter? :)


we would have no swerve drives, no shift on the fly gearboxes, no object-oriented autonomous programming, no WFA winners, no IRI, no Battlecry, no WRRF.


Hey now! I think students could have conceived of, designed and implemented shift on the fly gearboxes, OO-Programming and swerve drives! Most of those things are childs-play (literally) for engineers.

[JVN]

I see absolutely no value in an entirely engineer built robot. Is that really so insulting? I mean, if the students just watch the engineer do brilliant things, they might as well read a book about great innovators. I really do not mean to be insulting, I have immense respect for every F.I.R.S.T. mentor I've ever met, but for the purposes of arguement I'm talking about a hypothetical extreme: an entirely engineer/mentor built robot, something I consider to be indicative of a terrible state of affairs. It could probably never happen in the real world, I said it merely to illustrate the worst case scenario. The closer you get to that worst case scenario, the worse off you are. The flip side of the coin isn't good either: purposely shunning any engineer involvement is contrary to the spirit of F.I.R.S.T. It's about balance, and if you are going to be off-kilter, I think it better to be off kilter on the lack-of-engineer involvement side of things. But why be off-kilter? :)

A truly sensible philosophy.
However (as is probably true for many others), I did not distill this message from your previous posts. I am glad you've clarified for all of us, where you stand.

[Greg McCoy]

I see absolutely no value in an entirely engineer built robot.

Most who disagree with you would say there is little value in an entirely student built robot, either. You might learn a few things, but it seems like a better idea to learn from experienced people who know what they're doing than to try to reinvent the wheel.

To me, shunning help from people who have experience is silly and wasteful. We live in a world where few products come from a single person. It seems to me that to be sucessful in engineering is more to be able to work with and learn from others than to be able to say "I came up with this myself!"

Even though I consider myself a hands-on person, I'm much more inspired by watching/helping an engineer build a robot than I am by an engineer handing me a kit of parts and a machine shop and saying "have at it."

[phrontist]

Even though I consider myself a hands-on person, I'm much more inspired by watching/helping an engineer build a robot than I am by an engineer handing me a kit of parts and a machine shop and saying "have at it."

Again, neither is a good situation, but I think entirely student run is the lesser of two evils.

[Andy Baker]

Hey now! I think students could have conceived of, designed and implemented shift on the fly gearboxes, OO-Programming and swerve drives! Most of those things are childs-play (literally) for engineers.

Eventually, possibly, students would have developed these things in the future. Sure, we see students designing these things now, but that is only possible because of people like Dr. Joe Johnson, Chris Hibner, Mike Soukup, Steve Kyramarios, Raul Olivera, Dan Green, Jim Zontag, Mark Rizzo, Robert Triggs, Mike Betts, Doug Hogg, Greg Mills, Anthony Lapp, Ed Sparks, Mike Ciavaglia, Jeff Burch, Glenn Thoroughman, Dave Flowerday, Tom Nader, Paul Copioli, Tony Norman, Bob Mimlitch, Travis Covington, JVN, Marc Rogers, Mark Jones, James Jones, Rob Bayer, Mark Koors, Alan Anderson, Steve Butler, Bill Beatty, Gary Dillard, PJ Baker, Scott Vierstra, Andy Bradley, Jay Tenbrink, Kenny Ardizzone, Lucien Junken, Dave Lavery, Steve Shade, Stu Bloom, Ian McKenzie, and many others have designed something to show them how.

If you don't know these people, you need to. Heck, there are many more things being developed by mentors in FIRST I don't even know about. Seek them out. Ask them what they developed or helped to develop. Learn from them. This will inspire you to new heights. Then... pass it on. Mimic these developments, improve upon them, share it with others, inspire your peers and the people who look up to you. This is what makes FIRST special.

Andy B.

[Dave Flowerday]

I see absolutely no value in an entirely engineer built robot.
I've been through 7 seasons of FIRST and I have yet to come across any robot that I could confirm was built entirely by engineers. Once again, I think a lot of people see robots which they assume are made entirely by engineers and run with it. And statements like this keep reinforcing it for the newcomers (even if you're only speaking hypothetically).

The more we allow for these professionally designed and built robots to dominate the FIRST competitions, the more it encourages student run teams to start letting the engineers design and build the robots. FIRST will start to discourage many teams from participating when they realize that the robot they spent six weeks on has no chance of success at the competition.If we don't have a fair competition, it will quickly degrade into a sham.
Guess what people: this debate is nothing new. People (including me) were saying things just like this in 1995. I remember getting beaten by (what I thought was) an engineer-built bot and thinking it was so unfair. And I remember saying that the competition will not grow if it continues. Well, that was 10 years ago when there were 43 teams at the Championship and 1 regional. Guess what: I was wrong. Way wrong. FIRST has like 1000 teams now with 20-some regionals, and more coming every year.

FIRST seems to have found a formula for success, and that includes all the types of teams out there, not just student-built teams. Some of you are talking about mentors who are interested in the competition and engaged with their teams as if it's a bad thing. Frankly, some of the things being said in this thread are borderline insulting to mentors who volunteer up to thousands of hours each in order to provide this opportunity for you guys. Some of you are acting like we should volunteer all this time but do so solely to operate as babysitters and not "get in the way". I'm sorry, but the fact of the matter is a lot of the great engineers in this program probably wouldn't be here if they were not given the opportunity to work on their robots alongside their students.

To all of you on here who are speaking so harshly about engineers who design parts of their robot: hopefully you don't use any of the kit transmissions, or kit frame, or parts from Andymark, or Skyway wheels, or anything else that isn't a raw material because guess what: those parts were designed by professional engineers. If your team buys a transmission and has students install it, is that really better than another team who has an engineer design their own transmission and their students install it?

[Lisa Perez]

I think we all concur that mentors do indeed have a key role in the 'I' of FIRST. If a team does not have the resources for whatever reason, however, the students are not necessarily not being inspired. Rather, I think that such a situation would inspire the students - simply in a different manner than would be expected. When they do research on a drive train or form of appendage or approach a corporation on their own (to name a couple of examples), they are - in my opinion - inspiring themselves to persevere, to be innovative, to recognize their own talents.

Nonetheless, we must find it integral to recognize help where help is offered. When I was a sophomore on my team, we took pride in having a 100% student-built robot (a few negatives for this have been mentioned throughout the thread) - but that is definitely not to say that we did not accept aid from our mentors. Our mentors were the ones to teach us the concepts of physics during the design process. They offered us tips on what appendages might work, all while stressing the importance of simplicity and allowing us to select what we thought would work most efficiently. Our mentors taught us how to use the machine tools. In essence, they empowered us by giving us the knowledge necessary to build a robot and have a successful team. Did they touch the robot? No. But did they inspire us? Most definitely.

I had been given the opportunity to see the contrast between the different types of teams as a student who had been on two teams. I must say that I found inspiration in both types, and while the kinds of inspiration differed, the point is that the 'I' was indeed existent.

[phrontist]

I've come to the realization that holding opinions on things publicly is a really, really, bad idea. Really. I'm not being sarcastic for once. Having received negative rep from people I really respect, I now realize that this navel gazing, while fun for a while, is ultimately divisive. Talk is cheap.

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Yes, great you stood up for something, what does it get you? Nothing. From the perspective of risk-management, holding opinions, espescially in arena's outside your control, is highly illogical.

Oh heavens, now I hold opinions about holding opinons. I'm meta opinonated! Ack! Wait, was that a judgemental "ack"... am I meta-meta-opinionated?

It's a downward spiral folks.

[Alexander McGee]

I've come to the realization that holding opinions on things publicly is a really, really, bad idea. Really. I'm not being sarcastic for once. Having received negative rep from people I really respect, I now realize that this navel gazing, while fun for a while, is ultimately divisive. Talk is cheap.
...
It's a downward spiral folks.

Please understand where everyone is coming from. A high percent of the people who have posted in this thread have never been a student on a team. You see it from your perspective, others see it from theirs. As I see it, students in FIRST fall into 4 categories:

Students on engineer-run teams have mixed emotions; some students love it and see the inspiration of a well engineered machine first-hand. Others see it as though the engineers don't listen to their input, or take control and it isn't really "the student's robot".

Students on student-run reams have the same thing; some of the kids love being involved 100% (or close) on all the decisions. Some hate it and are sometimes overwhelmed by everything and wish desperately for experienced guidance.

Having experienced both perspectives first-hand, I have come to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter in the end. As many people have said, this isn't designed to be a competition; it is designed to inspire and motivate high school students into a career involving science, math, and technology.

As long as you remain involved because you LOVE what you are doing and the things that have seen, it doesn’t matter who wins and looses the "competition" and, it doesn’t matter who build or designed a robot.

Just remember some of the things that flat-out amazed you about robots. Chances are that an adult helped with it. Instead of criticizing the team, try to beat them! Come up with something amazing for the next year.

I know it can be hard to make people understand what you have experienced, as no person has experienced every facet of every team. Just try to remember that we care only about you, not the robots and not about wining. We want you to get an engineering degree, make lots of money, and love what you are doing. Or at least I do!

-Alex

[Anne Shade]

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is the fact that even student run teams with no engineering support may very well have received the help of engineers. There are many teams that have used the resources made available here on Chiefdelphi by some of the very engineers that Andy listed in his post above. These resources have helped many teams that don't believe they need engineering help take their robots to the next level. Imagine what you could do if you had some engineers full time?

FIRST isn't about building robots. That's just the tool used to get the message across that with some effort, these high school students can have careers in engineering and that those careers are fun!!! Working alongside these engineers or even interacting with engineers at competitions and on these boards is what achieves these goals. The closer the engineers are the more accessible it makes their job seem and the more students learn about what it really means to be an engineer.

I know how it feels to be on a team where the students get to do very little for their robot and to be on a team run fully by students. There are very few people that have been on both sides of the fence. I've learned that the engineers are a very vital part of keeping this program successful and that before you judge others, you should try to step into their shoes for a little while. Try getting a few engineers to help out and see what happens...

After some more thinking.... Andy, there is one little problem with your list above. Where are the women engineers???

[phrontist]

Now this is getting silly... why on earth are people negatively repping phrontist?

Woah woah woah! Don't jump to conclusions. Yes, they were mentors, but they had valid points. Most disagree with the delivery of the comments, rather then their contents.

I have not stopped arguing because someone said my points were invalid (dost thou thinkest me a coward?!). I stopped for the reasons stated above, nothing more, nothing less. The comments of mentors made me reconsider the whole endeavor.

[Ryan Foley]

I'll bite.

Here’s the big problem. How are high schoolers supposed to compete against professionally designed and built robots? This is where the true conflict is. The teams who believe that FIRST is better when the students actually build and manage the robot get destroyed in competition. FIRST is not supposed to be a professional engineering competition. If the engineering mentors want that, there are other avenues. FIRST is meant to Inspire the STUDENTS. The more we allow for these professionally designed and built robots to dominate the FIRST competitions, the more it encourages student run teams to start letting the engineers design and build the robots. FIRST will start to discourage many teams from participating when they realize that the robot they spent six weeks on has no chance of success at the competition.

Actually, I have seen all-student built teams win. Team 939 won at their regional (Sirbleedsalot who posted earlier in this thread is from that team), and my former team, 350, won the BAE regional with 121 and 126.

Sure, sometimes the student-built teams may not have the same resources that they would if they had engineers, and perhaps sometimes the bots are of the same caliber as others, but it doesnt mean they cant win. Keep in mind that strategy and alliances are a vital part of the game, especially this year. It's not just about who has a better bot.

[Katie Reynolds]

Why do FIRST teams start with the intention of this being a "student design competition"? Because some teams don't want to turn into the "our-engineers-build-99%-of-our-robot powerhouse" they've seen dominate the competition time and time again. But instead of asking for help from mentors who may have a better understanding of what's going on, these teams go from one extreme to the other. Personally, I was a little like that when I started in FIRST. I'd like to think that, in the past five years, I've grown a little wiser. After being involved for awhile and seeing teams on both ends of the spectrum, I don't think either extreme does anyone much good.

But the mentors already know everything. The point is not always to get the robot done fastest, it is for you students to learn something. I'm mentoring a team this year, and I sure don't know everything! Especially when it comes to engineering. I know enough to get by in a pinch, and I know what I learned from my years in FIRST. For me, part of the fun of FIRST is coming back and learning so much new stuff year after year - not just from other mentors but from high school students as well! But math is, by far, my worst subject, and - though I think engineers are so awesome - engineering really isn't my thing. The primary reason I'm joining this team to help with team organization and fund-raising (... raising funds - sorry, Schuff :o) When the time comes, I'll help out with the robot but it won't be with my ability to do mind-boggling physics. It will be helping the students on the team figure out the best way to attach piece A to piece B. It'll be me saying, "hmm I'm not sure if we can do that - let me check the rules" when someone has a question about the legality of what they're about to do. No, I don't know everything and honestly, I don't want to.

One thing that's up to debate for me and my team is who should be running the organization and the managing of the team -- students or adults? Both.

When I was on team 93, the mentors took care of travel arrangements, running some team meetings, issues with the high school and getting food to the team during the build and at competitions - they oversaw students taking care of the majority of everything else, organization-wise. Ordering shirts, picking out swappables, getting buttons made, setting up and running fundraisers, setting up meetings with potential new sponsors, doing demonstrations ... even ordering materials (with mentor approval!) was sometimes done by the students. The mentors were always there to make sure we didn't screw up too badly - but they did, occasionally, let us screw up and learn from our mistakes. One of the most important things Sean Schuff ever taught me was how to fail forward (http://www.eazigoal.com/what-is-failing-forward.html). There's a great book by John C. Maxwell on the subject called Failing Forward: How to Make the Most of Your Mistakes (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0785274308/qid=1124387137/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-4818958-8254247?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) - check it out!

I see absolutely no value in an entirely engineer built robot. Is that really so insulting? I mean, if the students just watch the engineer do brilliant things, they might as well read a book about great innovators. Perhaps watching an engineer build a robot doesn't inspire you personally, but what if that's all the students on the team are looking for? What if they are inspired by watching someone else?

Don't make the mistake of thinking everyone learns the same, thinks the same, and is inspired in the same ways as you.

[Katie Reynolds]

((I split the above post and this one, because as a single post it was just too long!))

Alright, back to the beginning:

Dare I ask... Which "team" is better? What defines "better"?When I first started in FIRST I would have said, "A team that is 100% student-run is the best way to go!" The last few years on my high school team I realized, "No, having a perfect balance of student and mentor contributions is the best way to go!" Now, I don't think either of those statements is correct because there is no best way.

Rich pointed out before that the key is flexibility. What works for team A doesn't work for team B. Similarly, what works for team A one year, might not work for them the next.

Let's take a closer look at teams A and B:

Year One

Team A is almost entirely student run. The students have elected other students to lead individual subteams, and everything seems to be running very smoothly. The mentors decide to help out, but take a back seat when it comes to the majority of the work. Ship day comes along, and while the somewhat frazzled students struggle to get everything packed and ready to go on time, they make it. Team A competes at two competitions and places thrid and eighth, respectively. At their team banquet, they reminisce about the great year they had and everyone is sad that the student-elected leaders will all be graduating. In the end, the students have inspired the mentors with their fantastic designs (some of which the mentors would not have thought of themselves!) and the students were inspired by other students on the team for taking such a big leadership role.

Team B is mostly run by mentors. The students have a hand in some PR stuff, and occasionally are allowed to cut basic parts in the machine shop. The robot is finished by week four - mostly built in the main sponsor's workshop. The robot is brought to the high school where the mentor's show off their creation. The students are amazed at what an awesome job the engineers have done - not only does the machine run perfectly, the welds are immaculate and the graphics are perfect. Team B competes at a few regionals and takes first place, then goes on to win the Championship. Even though the students didn't have a huge part in builidng the robot, winning the competition and seeing what a great job their engineers did excites them and inspires them to pursue a more active role in the team and in engineering itself.

In both instances, the students are inspired to continue with FIRST and engineering. Both teams had "good years" and did well in the competition. For these two teams, the way their respective teams were run worked. Now, check this out:

If team A were run like team B, the mentors would run the show. No student elections would be held, because there would be no student leadership positions to fill. Students who were once eager and willing to take the lead either quit or don't do much of anything, since they've been given the distinct impression that they are not needed. The engineers come in with their robot and, while some of the students ooh and ahh over it, the majority of students think, "Why did they do this thing, this way?" They question the engineers and get the answer, "Because this is the way it will work best." Conflict arises when the students think they have a better solution, and since the robot is finished two weeks early they still have time to implement what they want to do. The engineers won't have it, and take the robot back to their shop to make sure the students don't "mess with it". The students have no time to practice driving and end up placing last at all of their competitions. They have no team spirit and a lot of the students aren't sure they'll come back the next year. The only way the students have been inspired, is to go to the other extreme and make sure they're in charge next year, because "they know they'll do a better job."

Case in point - what works for one team doesn't necessarily work for another.

Going back to teams A and B; the teams are in their second year now. The rookies on both teams are hearing how wonderful FIRST is and what a great time the teams had the previous year.

Year Two

Team A holds the student election but the elected students aren't all that concerned about their positions. The mentors start to worry when it's week three and practically nothing is done. Concerned about thier team, the mentors start to step up and help with design and building of the robot. Unfortunately, they are met with resistance from students on the team who were around during year one. These students insist that they can build the robot on their own again so the mentors back down. Week five comes up more quickly than anyone expected and all the robot consists of is a shoddy frame, some wires and a couple of half finished wheels. The mentors finish the robot - again, with much protest from the team veterans - and the team goes on to compete at two regionals. They place 20/22 at their first regional and dead last in the second. The team goes on to the Championship but doesn't do well there either, since everyone is so physically and emotionally drained. The end of the year banquet isn't nearly as fun, because everyone is thinking, "wow, where did we go wrong? It worked last year - what happened?" No one is inspired and half the team quits because they had such a miserable time.

Team B goes on being mostly mentor-run. Like the previous year, the robot is done in 4 weeks to allow the students more drive time and the students are yet again amazed and what their engineers have come up with. This year, the students are allowed to take a slightly larger role with PR and are allowed to put together the Chairman's Award presentation. Again, the team dominates the competition and places third at the Championship. At the end of the year, the team celebrates and thinks, "this works for us - it's the way our team should be run!" The students have been inspired by the engineers' design and by the fact that they did so well - again - in the competition.

Team A is a good example of "what works for a team one year, may not work the next." Had the students stepped back a little bit, and realized that they did need help, they might have done much better and had a lot more fun.

Team B is a good example of "just because a team is run by mentors, doesn't mean the students come away uninspired." Team B found what worked best for them and ran with it. Both years the students walked away feeling inspired and wanting to know more about and do more with engineering. They're two for two on successful* years.

Bottom line:

The cases above are just two ways things could go. There are a thousand different scenarios and a thousand different ways to run a team, and neither of them is "the best way." There is no formula to figure out what will inspire people the most, what will win you the competition the easiest, or how to run the team as smoothly as possible.

The "best" way to run a team isn't by having it all student run, or all mentor run. It's not splitting the "power" 50/50 and having students do their half and mentors do theirs. It's about finding what works best for the team - finding what inspires team members and having the ability to realize that you may have to change the way your team is run slightly, from year to year.

As soon as you can do that, you've truly found the best way to run a team.

* = successful, as the students on the team were inspired by what they saw and learned.

[Chris Hibner]

Phrontist: First - don't feel bad about having opinions and making them public. You can't try to please all of the people all of the time.

For everyone on this thread: just be sure that you post due to logic - not emotion. I know there are people that disagree with some of Andy Baker's points (phrontist's posts and others prove it). The reason that Andy is so well respected is that he doesn't (okay - rarely) posts when his emotions are controlling his typing. He posts when he has thought about it very clearly and logically.


I see absolutely no value in an entirely engineer built robot. Is that really so insulting? I mean, if the students just watch the engineer do brilliant things, they might as well read a book about great innovators.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Okay, the reason for the post.

I'm going to disagree with the above statement, and I'm going to go DEEP into the FIRST rhetoric archives.

When Dean used to explain what FIRST was all about, he used to use the example of an NBA game. When young people went to NBA games to watch Michael Jordan, everyone left wanting to play in the NBA and be just like Michael Jordan. They were inspired. Was it because these young people got to play in the NBA game? Heck NO (duh!). It's because they watched greatness occurring in front of them.

FIRST used to preach this a long time ago. The message was that people ARE inspired just by watching - the NBA proves it. That doesn't mean that is the only way to run a team - but it IS a perfectly acceptable way.

[Pat Roche]

I see things from both points of view that Andy started this thread from. When I first started doing FIRST I was on a small grass roots team. The team I was on has been struggling to find a company to give them a major sponsorship to help fund the team. The team remained competitive regardless of the lack of technical support they recieved from professionals. The team functioned with a teacher, a professional welder and the students. As the team grew in the next few years they were able to expand to recieve help from some of the parents who were engineers. The designs were still made by the students; they were simply assisted by the adults.The inspiration in all this comes from the guidance that was given to the students. The inspiration allowed for cleaner and better built machines.
The team still does not have an corporate sponsor with engineers but the students learn enough about theyre machine and with some guidance from the adults the still functions at a competitive level and the students learn alot about engineering, science and awhole lot more.

Moral of the story: A team does not need to have engineers to compete competitively but proper guidance from engineers is always a welcome contribution to a team.


-Pat

[mechanicalbrain]

Allot of people have thrown the word build around and used it in a variety of forms. I want to be clear here. Are we talking about building or designing? They are two very different things and i think shape you're posts into very different messages.

Overall i don't think mentor involvement should be viewed as a bad thing. I love mentors and think they do bring inspiration to FIRST. Its just i see mentors get over eager in their desire to help. Nothing is wrong with a robot that is student built (yes their are student built robots believe it or not) also their is nothing wrong with mentor built robots. I guess the only place i get rubbed wrong is when i see mentors designing the robot over the kids. And you cant tell me it doesn't happen. lots of us are guilty of wanting to promote our idea over somebody Else's. I'm not saying the robots need to be 100% student built. I just think that the robot should be representative of the students ideas.

Also this thread will stay alive longer if we don't directly refer to others post. your not going to change someones opinion by pointing out where you think they are wrong. People are untitled to their ideas and will get defensive about them. Respect peoples opinion even if you don't agree with it. This is a good thread and i would hate to see it fall apart into personal attacks.

[Steve W]

I am going to state a small lesson that I learned on my trip to Africa. I guess that it is a science lesson that can be applied to this topic.

I was told when I arrived that I needed to drink water. When I stated that I wasn't thirsty I was told that by the time you felt thirsty your body was already being stressed by lack of water. If however you had a consistent supply of water to your body then you would not get thirsty and your body wouldn't become stressed.

Take the above story and replace the water with engineers. A lot of the time we do not realize our needs until it's too late.

[sciguy125]

This thread could go on for ten pages and I guarentee the only thing that will be agreed on is "to each their own"
That’s exactly what I wanted to bring up. I pointed it out before, but I feel that I need to reemphasize it. Each team has it’s own priorities. The way your team is run depends on these priorities. If you’re not sure what your team is all about, I suggest sitting everyone down in a meeting and trying to figure it out.

Everyone is arguing and showing why what they think might be “better”, but few are seeing that everyone has different perspectives. There are merits to more or less mentor involement, but each team has to chose which they want to take advantage of. One team may feel that winning at the expense of not giving students as much hands on experience is worth it. Another may feel that it doesn’t even matter if they make it to competition as long as the students got to do everything.

But the mentors already know everything. The point is not always to get the robot done fastest, it is for you students to learn something.
Personally, I sometimes find mentors are too limited in thier decisions. Engineers tend to stick with "well, we know how to do this so we'll keep doing it this way". Students, esp when they come and go tend to bring creativity and different approaches that us old curmudgeon sometime lack.
I’ve found that inexperienced people are the most creative. They don’t have the background that they need to get the job done, so they have to make it up as they go along. If someone tells you how to crack open a walnut, you’ll keep using what they teach you. If you figure it out on your own, you may have a new, better method. If you want your students to learn and be creative, you might have to let them flop around and make mistakes. While throwing knowledge at newbies might be more efficient, it hinders creativity.

You could also see this the other way around. Fostering creativity might not be as important as completing the project in the allotted 6 weeks. They can still learn after everything is finished. Learning through observation has it merits. FIRST allows students to see how real world engineering works. If they don’t learn that much about the technical details right now, they’ll be going to college anyway.

I think that the real problem here is everyone's definition of "performance". So what if the robot doesn't match up to the other ones? So what if there is something that was designed/built/engineered better than yours? Does this not inspire our students? Does it not make them want to do better the next year?
Just because a robot doesn’t perform that great doesn’t mean that people won’t learn or won’t be inspired. Our 2004 drivetrain was horrible (my apologies to Scott). In 2005, we analyzed it and figured out all the problems with it and fixed them in the new design. There were simple solutions to each problem individually, but it was decided that the drivetrain would be completely overhauled instead. Various ideas were borrowed from other teams (mostly the higher ranked ones). It worked better than we intended. A few parents pointed out that the evolution from the 2004 to the 2005 drivetrain was incredible. There are only a few minor issues with it that need to be worked out. Had the 2004 drivetrain worked reasonably well, it may have been decided to just tweak it. We would not have looked to other teams, and would not have learned some new techniques that were used in building/designing the new drivetrain.

Of course, some might feel that consistent “failure” would discourage people. Why would they keep coming back if they know they are going to fail? As the 2004 drivetrain started to show its wear and tear in its poor performance, a lot of team members started to get discouraged. I couldn’t believe how many people were just moping around despite the fact that we still had a decent chance. If these failures happen at inopportune times, people might start leaving.

A reoccurring debate on our team has always been, if there are no high school students interested in doing a task (wiring, programming, chairmans, animation, or anything on the team) then what?
On 1351, if nobody wants to do it, it doesn’t get done. We’ve had to abandon a few projects because nobody wanted to do them. The people (students) that were qualified to do it were busy with other things and nobody else wanted to learn. It seems harsh, but it’s all about teamwork. Someone always steps up to take care of mission critical projects even if they don’t like it, because they know it needs to be done. Life isn’t always fair; if you want to help the team succeed, you might have to do something you don’t really want to.

However, by setting students up like this, they may shy away from engineering. If they have bad experiences about it before they go to college and get stuck with whatever degree they spent the last 4 years on, they might do something else. By doing the “dirty work” for them, they’ll be able to have the full experience because the team is able to advance. Instead of seeing the bad side of engineering, they’ll see the good side and hopefully stick with it.

A proper balance of mentors, engineers and students is one were they are all learning from each other, all being inspired and most important, that they are all having fun.
The robots without mentors would be boring and the kids would have no one to look up to and no one to guide them in building it. I know that on 1251 without our engineering and various other mentors we would not be able to make our robots and things we deisgn a reality.
Just because a robot is 100% student-built, doesn't mean mentors and engineers still can't help. We must remember that mentors should only be teaching. If mentors keep to teaching students the design process and how to use a machine and etc., and ensure the students are productive...
It seems that most people are sitting here. This is the safe spot. You get the best of both worlds. However, as I’ve been trying to point out, you don’t get to reap the full benefits of either extreme. If your team thinks that you need to be 100% student run, you get all the benefits that come with it. The same goes for a 100% mentor run team. If your team thinks that they can live in the middle, then so be it.

Just remember that you have to chose what is in your team’s best interests. If you haven’t done so aleady, get your team together and discuss what you want to get out of FIRST. Doing so will be good for more than just deciding on mentors, but also how you want to run your team in general. If your team has a direction and purpose, I think that you’ll be more successful. Success of course being defined however you want. Now go! Call everyone and set up a meeting.

Also this thread will stay alive longer if we don't directly refer to others post.
Oops, sorry. But I think I needed to in order to prove my point.

[Rickertsen2]

This is an interesting thread. I wish i had the time to write a lengthy response.

I am one of the founding mmmbers of an entirely student run team. We are not this way out of stubborness its just the way things have always been and we have never had any problem with it or seen the necessity for engineers. We are a competitive team and i do see that we are missing all that much. We have a number of extremely experienced/skilled students who mentor less experienced team members and we are our own self contained bundle of inspiration. We take great pride in knowing that our robot is 100% of our own design and craftsmanship.

[nehalita]

Maybe the formula here is that there is no formula.

And honestly, when everything's said and done -- what are we going to remember in our past about robotics? No one can do everything on the team but each student has the ability to get as much out of the experience as he or she wants. FIRST gives me (and everyone else) an open opportunity -- if i wanted to learn something and I couldn't learn it from my own team, there are always other teams I can go to for assistance. That's the point!

It always boils down to WHAT YOU WANT and HOW YOU'RE GOING TO GET IT. If everybody adopts this attitude (with respect to other's wishes) everything can fall into place. Satisfied, Dissatisfied -- it's all in the eyes of the beholder -- and sometimes these views can't be shared because the experiencers and the passerbyers see two different things.

We (clearly) have our differences in this chat, but it's all about opening our eyes: to problems, to discordance, and to solutions.

[Ryan F.]

Actually, I have seen all-student built teams win. Team 939 won at their regional (Sirbleedsalot who posted earlier in this thread is from that team), and my former team, 350, won the BAE regional with 121 and 126.

Sure, sometimes the student-built teams may not have the same resources that they would if they had engineers, and perhaps sometimes the bots are of the same caliber as others, but it doesnt mean they cant win. Keep in mind that strategy and alliances are a vital part of the game, especially this year. It's not just about who has a better bot.

Correct. I did over-generalize here. I know our team in the past has had great success at regionals as a student run team. But taking in the big picture, the "professionally built robots" do end up winning at a much higher level.


Another point...People, please don't take internet discussions too seriously. Many people will voice different opinions here, and they are not necessarily personal attacks.

[TonzOFun]

Our team has always prided ourselves as being a primarily student designed, student build and student run team. I believe that if students designs the robot, builds the robot, repairs the robot and are able to effectively compete, a team will take away much more than by following an engineer's example. If you come by our pit at a competition, you will see four to five students repairing the robot and a mentor standing back, allowing the students to repair the robot as they feel is best, and no engineer in sight. Seeing something that I helped design, build and compete with do well makes me motivated more than anything else.

Our mentors are there mainly to do registrations, supervision and make sure we get the parts we need. Our mentors are there to help when needed, but help improve student designs than imposing their own. Our mentors are primarily there to do anything the students aren't aloud/unable to do.

Our engineer sponsors come in throughout the build season to check on our progress and help with any parts we simply don't have the machines to make ourselves. The engineers are ready to help if needed, but we try and avoid having any aspect of the robot engineer designed.

You want to see something interesting? A new mentor from a mentor-run team trying to work with a student-run team.

[KathieK]

The "best" way to run a team isn't by having it all student run, or all mentor run. It's not splitting the "power" 50/50 and having students do their half and mentors do theirs. It's about finding what works best for the team - finding what inspires team members and having the ability to realize that you may have to change the way your team is run slightly, from year to year.

As soon as you can do that, you've truly found the best way to run a team. I agree. Team dynamics change so much from year to year that I think it's critical that teams meet in the pre-season for teambuilding exercises to learn what will work and won't for them. As the FIRST website states. "The FIRST Robotics Competition is an exciting, multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way."

[Andy A.]

OK. I'll post this quote one last time, and then I'm never bringing it up again. I've done it to many times. It's someone else's turn.



Portions of Speech by Dean Kamen

1998 FIRST Competition Kickoff Workshop, January 10, 1998

The Center for New Hampshire, Manchester, NH

[imperfectly transcribed from a videotape]

copyright 1998 PNHS and GMPT

I don’t know how many ways to try and continue to say it. . . What this organization is about is not education per se. I heard a lot of people, even last night, and I think they mean well, and I understand what you’re saying, there needs to be a balance, but I heard people saying "well sure that other team did great, but thats because the engineers did all the work. The kids didn’t build the robot." I have to tell you, FIRST is not an educational institution. Its okay if the kids build the whole robot, its okay if they don’t touch it. FIRST ought to be to education what the NFL or the World Series is to little league.

Just do the mental experiment in which there is no professional football, there is no little league. Do you think that little kids at the age of six, seven, and eight are going to get up and spend hours exercising, striving to get better and better at what would become a cardiovascular exercise running up and down a field? Imagine how many kids would spend those kinds of hours practicing basketball if there was no Michael Jordan.

The harsh reality is this country doesn’t have an NCAA of smarts or Olympic Committee of brains. We don’t have people as well known as Michael Jordan doing little things like inventing CAT scanners, curing diseases, putting a man on the moon. You and your companies are those people.

Bottom line? It really does you no good to wring your hands over how much your students are learning. What they are learning making a few parts a year is pretty minor compared to what they will learn in collage and on the job. I came out of 3 years on 95 as a student thinking I had soaked up every little detail there was on robotics. The reality was that I had soaked up a bunch of details on how to make a FIRST robot. Theres a difference.

Our job as mentors isn't to teach them how to make a robot. Or to hand them a box of parts and say "Go". It's to teach them that there is value in technology and being among the people who create it. This isn't an easy thing to teach someone who wants nothing more then to get out of school. But you can do it. Just stay focused on whats important.

If I find a student on my team who came through FIRST having learned nothing more then he wanted to go to MIT, I'll give my self a pat on the back and start counting down to kickoff.

-Andy A.

[ghansel]

I could write an entire page about this, but really all it comes down to is the fact that there is no "correct" amount of mentor involvement.

This thread could go on for ten pages and I guarantee the only thing that will be agreed on is "to each their own"

In two sentences, Cory managed to say more of (perhaps ironically) absolute truth than all of the other posts in this thread combined.

I'll bite. Hard.

<ACID>
Being on a team with no adult technical mentors, to answer the question "Why do teams voluntarily do FIRST without adult technical mentors?" would require me to justify the actions of myself and my team to others. This is something I am loathe to do in a largely closed-minded (among other things) community with such a degree of homogeneity of thought as ChiefDelphi (so shoot me... and prove me right). But what I can say is that actions speak louder than words. The only students that left Team 19 after our extremely unsuccessful 2005 season were graduating seniors. I don't know if it would be the same with another team; I don't know anybody on another team personally. But I am proud of them for it. Our motivations are our own. The "inexplicable" fact remains that we voluntarily participate in FIRST without adult technical mentors.
</ACID>


To each person, their own goal in participating in FIRST. To each individual, due credit for their accomplishments. It's altogether wrong to say that the actions of any person or group of people are wrong when they harm nobody. This goes in life as well as in FIRST.

George Hansel.

[Alexander McGee]

In two sentences, Cory managed to say more of (perhaps ironically) absolute truth than all of the other posts in this thread combined.

I'll bite. Hard.

<ACID>
Being on a team with no adult technical mentors, to answer the question "Why do teams voluntarily do FIRST without adult technical mentors?" would require me to justify the actions of myself and my team to others. This is something I am loathe to do in a largely closed-minded (among other things) community with such a degree of homogeneity of thought as ChiefDelphi (so shoot me... and prove me right). But what I can say is that actions speak louder than words. The only students that left Team 19 after our extremely unsuccessful 2005 season were graduating seniors. I don't know if it would be the same with another team; I don't know anybody on another team personally. But I am proud of them for it. Our motivations are our own. The "inexplicable" fact remains that we voluntarily participate in FIRST without adult technical mentors.
</ACID>


To each person, their own goal in participating in FIRST. To each individual, due credit for their accomplishments. It's altogether wrong to say that the actions of any person or group of people are wrong when they harm nobody. This goes in life as well as in FIRST.

George Hansel.

This thread has more do to with answering the question as to why teams decide not to utilize engineers or "adult mentors". I think you have misunderstood what many people have been saying. There is nothing wrong with student-run teams, and there is no reason to try and justify why you do things the way you do them. Frankly, I am a bit confused at what your post is really about. I expect something more fundamental when you "bite hard". Are you announcing that you readily refuse this kind of help, or that you can make it without it? I am also bewildered as to how you can be involved with a team as a "engineer" but not have anyone labeled as an "adult technical mentor"?

This community is anything but homogeneous. There are all kinds of teams with all kinds of people, and you will not find a single team that runs like another. The one common thing that we share is FIRST. We try to remember what this organization exists for: Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. We universally agree, and we should, that Inspiration is the only thing that matters in this organization. As long as your students remain involved and inspired, then mission accomplished.

Props to you for being involved in a student-run team. I can tell you from my own experience that it is a lot of work and is 100% worth the effort, and I think you would agree. However, don't misunderstand what people are saying in this thread. No one is attacking student-run teams, they are just trying to understand why people do it the way they do it. No one was calling anything "wrong", and no one has that right.

My team is student-run because I personally believe that more student involvement is a better outlet for the inspiration of my students. I have my way, others have theirs. The only thing wrong is when people tell others how to run their own teams.

I hope this helps clear things up!

-Alexander S. McGee

[ghansel]

My post was not clear enough (hey, for 11:30 at night...).

You say "We universally agree, and we should, that Inspiration is the only thing that matters in this organization." I agree completely and to contest this statement would be ridiculous because it's the second letter of FIRST.

I think, however, that it needs to be clarified. I think something like "We universally agree, and we should, that Inspiration is the only thing that matters to this organization and to every team leader." is more descriptive of the situation. Not necessarily that exactly, but it helps me illustrate my point. FIRST exists to inspire teenagers to pursue careers in science and technology... we all know this. But in that statement is a blindness to the sheer multitude of reasons that students join a FIRST program or found a FIRST program (forgive me, I have no personal experience with a school founding a FIRST team). In many lucky schools, the robotics team is an accredited course which gives the students time to do robotics stuff during school hours. In such a case, they might be motivated to join by a guidance counselor or a parent. Or they might join to look good to a prospective college. In other teams, the student might join just out of curiosity. In other cases, a student might join because he or she already knows they want a career in engineering, and robotics is the only outlet (such that it is) for their talent. Or a singer might join because the people on the robotics team are fun to be around, and she can do some PR work, despite having no interest in the robot itself (friend of mine). Whatever the dominant reason may be in a team (and this will be different in every team) the leader must adjust the way the team is run and the degree to which technical mentors are involved to best motivate, please, and inspire everyone on the team. That is the fundamental reason there is no correct amount of technical mentor involvement. Shame I only made it clear the second time through.

As to my team role of "engineer". You are not the first person to have been confused by that, but you are one of the people (perhaps the only one) who were tactful enough to ask without immediately demanding that I change it - on the grounds that "engineer" unambiguously means "adult technical mentor" or "professional engineer". Thank you. I am a highschool student on Team 19. By no means do I claim to be an engineer of any kind in real life. There are those my age who do; I am not one of them. But when school ends each day in January, February, and March, and I walk into the team meeting, or regional, I am walking into the fantasy of FIRST and into my "team role" of an engineer.

Thanks, I hope this clears something up. I hope to meet you (as well as many other people on these boards), because I'm a much kinder person in real life.

George Hansel

[Not2B]

I used to care about this kind of thing, but I don't anymore...

Run your team the way you want - I'm not going to care. It doesn't really effect us a great deal. I just hope your team is inspired, learning, and having fun like ours. If not, THEN you are doing something wrong.

[DB213parent]

As a brand, spanking-new entry to this group,I want to thank ChiefDelphi for providing such a valuable resource to FIRST "lifers." As I ready through all the responses to Andy's question, I became more aware of the fact that team-related issues are not the sole property of our team. Since I joined up in 1998, our team has gone from mentor-heavy and student-poor, to mentor-light and student rich, to the current situation - about 20 students and no mentors. The sorry details aren't important here, but I want to emphasize that RESPECT is a key component that is too often lacking among team members. If mentors don't respect the students' desire to learn and take an active role in the construction, they're missing the point of FIRST. If students refuse to accept the knowledge and experience of the mentors, that's not independence - it's arrogance.

Here's the place where I put out my call for help. With our mentor forces depleted, our parents' group is trying to step in and do what we can to help. However, we don't want to overstep our bounds and become intrusive. I already read "101 Ways Parents Can Help a FIRST Team," and there were many good ideas (but forget about me making luggage pom-poms - #48). Can I hear from some teams that have active parent organizations so we can find out if we're on the right track. Thanks to all of your for a truly thought-provoking thread.








We need to talk. Please sit down.

Let's discuss something that defines FIRST. Sometimes, this is the big white elephant in the corner that everyone wants to ignore... but it needs to be talked about. There are many opinions on this subject.

Why do FIRST teams start with the intention of this being a "student design competition"? Many teams operate this way. We see teams who are proud about having a "100% designed and built robot". These teams get awards for their student involvement.

I can respect this. They worked hard. They learned much. However, more likely than not, they performed not so well at a regional. These teams saw other teams come in with 4-5 engineering mentors and compete better. These other teams, with more adult involvement, may have engineers working in the pits, along side the students. They may have skilled trades machinists making parts for their team during the build season. They may have professional machine designers creating gearboxes or writing code.

Are both teams learning? yes.

Dare I ask... Which "team" is better? What defines "better"?

FIRST was founded on "Inspiration". It still is the cornerstone. Dean, Woodie, and the FIRST Board of Directors are involved because of this idea. It is a thrill to inspire someone to be great. It is a thrill to be inspired by others.

I contend that the best "team" is an equal balance of student involvement, teacher involvement, and engineer involvement. In my mind, can a engineer design something on a robot and be proud of that design? You bet. Some teams frown on this. Some teams, mentors, and students preach that this is wrong. What do you think? Why is that?

So... there is it is. This will be a debate. Opinions will be given, and people will disagree. That is ok. Let is out. It will be healthy.

Andy B.

[JVN]

...I want to emphasize that RESPECT is a key component that is too often lacking among team members. If mentors don't respect the students' desire to learn and take an active role in the construction, they're missing the point of FIRST. If students refuse to accept the knowledge and experience of the mentors, that's not independence - it's arrogance.

Thanks to all of your for a truly thought-provoking thread.

Thanks to YOU for a truly thought-provoking post. One of the best views of the issue I've seen. It definitely summarizes things in a good way.

Welcome to Chief Delphi!
(Certainly an excellent first post, here's to many more...)

[mechanicalbrain]

Arrrggggh I really don't like the name of this thread. Its a little provocative in some ways (no offense Andy i think our chat was great!). OK so Ive decided to amend my view a little. I still believe everything i posted before but Ive come to realize that it doesn't matter. My opinions and everyone else's only really apply to our perspective teams. While these posts are good in showing how other teams are run no team plan is better than any other. I don't think anyone should be shot down for their opinion ghansel and i hope nobaody did. The only reason a teams organization is wrong is if it no longer provides a fun and educational environment for the students or if it hampers a team from exemplifying FIRST goals. I think ultimately a team that is completely student run or mentor run (or a mix) is no better than any other (unless of course the reasons provided occur). I think a good part of the posts here supporting student run teams need to be specific. Honestly their is nothing wrong with mentors on teams but most of the posts here aren't talking about that. What there talking about are teams where mentors strong arm the students. This is something i think almost everyone(and some who agree probably do it without realizing it) here agrees should be avoided unless its absolutely dire. I personally hate it when a mentor OR student strong arms other students by suppressing their ideas. I think a good thing to keep in mind is that their truly is no such thing as right or wrong to this because a specific team will work better to certain leadership methods. The only real tragedy is when a team becomes so static that it can't adapt.

[funstuff]

I think that this topic is one that will never have a definate answer. I will however, post my own opinion, as I am a 3rd year veteran on 624.

Some adults may forget that we, as teenagers, feel a need to prove something to the world. To prove we are adults and adequate in the world. THIS is why teams knowingly participate in FIRST without adults to guide them. The students are in part blind to the fact that they do not know everything, as they might hope, and also in part, they are just as stubborn and controlling as some mentors.

Some students fail to realize that thirty-some-odd years ago, when the adults that are now assisting them in their endeavours, were students themselves. But unlike now, thirty years ago, there was no FIRST. There was no organized outlet for their creativity. They had no big and fancy toys to play with during their high school years, such as we have today. So, just as parents want to do their child's science projects for them, the mentors want to build the robot for the students. When they build the science project, of course that project will get first prize in the science fair. But is this fair? Hardly. It is not fair to the students. It is not fair to the other teams. It is most certainly not fair to the mentors themselves.

The best team is comprised of both students and mentors. And by mentors, I mean adults that help guide the students through the building process. There should never, ever be "mentors" building the robots, while the students of the team play cards. In that instance, they cease to be mentors and are simply engineers.

The mentors should be the people who ensure that things are getting done, but are not doing said things. The students who design and build the robot should, by all means go to their mentors with their problems, as the mentors are the ones with college degrees in engineering and physics. I have many an instance when even the adults learned something from the students.

Our school sponsor this year and last year, as opposed to previous years' sponsors, is not a physics teacher, or a calculus teacher. She teaches Spanish. When we first got her involved, she had absolutely no idea what she was doing, except supporting some students who were in dire need of assistance. Now, she has learned so much from the students and the other mentors. She is, in truth, a FIRST fanatic at times. But this is what happens when the spirit of FIRST inspires people. I have seen it inspire not only students and mentors, but parents as well.

There must always be a balance, and, as posted above, a sense of respect between the adults and the students. Both sides need to understand that most of the time, students have minds and ideas with an abundance of creativity, just like most of the time, mentors have minds and ideas with an good deal of knowledge and experience. These two entities can not, despite many beliefs, survive without one another. The best way to survive is to thrive, and to do so by working with one another, rather than against one another, that is truely success, whether or not the competition is won.

As a team, we have realized that only under extremely lucky conditions will we ever win a championship, being primarily student built robot. I think no one is devestated by this fact because there is so much more to FIRST than winning. We realize that many times, the teams whose robots win or are almost perfect are not built by students, by any length of the imagination. Our team, to the best of my knowledge, would rather do OUR best, with mentors working alongside students, than be THE best with great sacrifices in who builds the robot. We are not a machine. We are a team. We make mistakes and we learn from them. That is a fact of life. Any team that can not make a small mistake without great consequence is more machine than human. And all teams are primarily human, with one very important machine. But I digress...

Simply, the mentors are a necessary factor in a FIRST team, but they will almost always tread the fine line between mentoring, and doing. Keep in mind that students are the core of every team, a necessary evil. Without the students, there would be no FIRST, just a bunch of old men sitting around playing with their hi-tech toys, losing their creativity. The mentors are not a necessity, but a great and valued component to any team.

[KathieK]

Here's the place where I put out my call for help. With our mentor forces depleted, our parents' group is trying to step in and do what we can to help. However, we don't want to overstep our bounds and become intrusive. I already read "101 Ways Parents Can Help a FIRST Team," and there were many good ideas (but forget about me making luggage pom-poms - #48). Can I hear from some teams that have active parent organizations so we can find out if we're on the right track. Thanks to all of your for a truly thought-provoking thread.LOL, Elaine, you've come to the right place! (and the luggage pom-poms also make great sneaker accessories!) So I won't bore the rest of you, I will PM you with details of NEMO (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/papers.php?s=&action=single&paperid=499). We can help!

[mechanicalbrain]

So obviously you are for mentor run teams but i think some of your statements are a little askew.


The mentors should be the people who ensure that things are getting done, but are not doing said things.

Okay its sounds to me like your talking about a team where mentors tell students how to build a robot which is contradicted by saying the students design the robot. What type of things should mentors insure in your opinion?


The students who design and build the robot should, by all means go to their mentors with their problems, as the mentors are the ones with college degrees in engineering and physics.

Uhh im not sure i agree with this fully. Speaking strictly from actual experience being a engineer gives a mentor no advantage over a student when it come to building robotics. As mentioned in other threads robotics is rarely covered in college. In fact i know a mentor who has designed xray systems for submarine inspection yet has no clue when it came to our robots specific abilities. He was knowledgable about electrics but in plenty of cases it just didn't carry over.


There must always be a balance, and, as posted above, a sense of respect between the adults and the students. Both sides need to understand that most of the time, students have minds and ideas with an abundance of creativity, just like most of the time, mentors have minds and ideas with an good deal of knowledge and experience. These two entities can not, despite many beliefs, survive without one another. The best way to survive is to thrive, and to do so by working with one another, rather than against one another, that is truely success, whether or not the competition is won.

I think that the knowledge of the students is underplayed in this part. Frankly
your last sentence is completely contradictory to the next section.


As a team, we have realized that only under extremely lucky conditions will we ever win a championship, being primarily student built robot. I think no one is devestated by this fact because there is so much more to FIRST than winning. We realize that many times, the teams whose robots win or are almost perfect are not built by students, by any length of the imagination.
THIS is what i have a problem with. I think this is hardly true for reasons mentioned before and because a student with experience can design amazing pieces. Two great examples are Tytus and Arefin (the first to come to mind. hope you guys don't mind) who both did great work while in college. Even Engineers with knowledge in a specific area can have trouble because they can design a otherwise amazing system but find that unless they have experience in robotics that their system just isn't practical (inappropriately weighted systems and a lack of understanding of parts limits is a primary problem) Again mentor run teams are not bad but its the generalizations that get to me. I know I'm a hypocrite in making this post and if any of you figure out why don't bother posting.

[sure_smile]

I think the most important thing is to find a balance- at Championships, I went out scouting for a little while, and at some teams' pit areas you were directed straight to the mentors when you had technical questions, because there would not be a single student who could answer; I don't think that is right.

Last year was our rookie year (tho two out of our three co-captains had been on a FIRST team before), and we had a 'mentor hands-off' policy. Our team was interesting because we were 9 people, and most didn't have any pertaining experience at all, myself included. We were really lucky in that our mentors were understanding, because they taught us everything, without taking over, and now I fully appreciate how difficult that must have been for them; this last saturday, I was with our LEGO team, and it took all my willpower not to just grab the legos and run away cackling madly; i mean, i LOVE legos :D ! and i bet our mentors felt that way all build season, but for the most part they wouldn't actually pick up something and start working at it unless we asked them- once we asked, they were free to help. And as a result, we learned a LOT. we knew from that start that if we built it on our own, our robot may not be one of the 'winning' ones, the ones that everyone wants in their alliance. but we made a conscious decision that having a 'winning' robot didnt matter as much to us, we just wanted to have fun and learn. as it was, we had tons of fun and learned a lot, and our robot did fine. it is part of a mentor's responsibility to know when to back off (and to do so if asked), but eqaully it is the student's responsibility to willing stick their nose to the grindstone when that time comes; a mentor cannot be blamed for doing it themselves if the students are slacking off.

finding the balance is the most important thing for a team to be successful- i don't mean top 8 seed successful, i mean 'everyone is inspired, happy, and has learned so much that they have forgotten what their house looks like' successful...

just my 2 cents (aaaaaaaa where did the cents sign go? ....can't...find....)

[Andy Baker]

Uhh im not sure i agree with this fully. Speaking strictly from actual experience being a engineer gives a mentor no advantage over a student when it come to building robotics. As mentioned in other threads robotics is rarely covered in college. In fact i know a mentor who has designed xray systems for submarine inspection yet has no clue when it came to our robots specific abilities. He was knowledgable about electrics but in plenty of cases it just didn't carry over.

This generalization is wrong and essentially insulting to engineers.

1. Being an engineer is advantageous for building successful robots. There are thousands of companies around the world who design and build robots (automated industrial systems, consumer robotics, and robotic toys, just to name a few markets). Who does the majority of the designing and developing of these robots? Engineers. Companies in these markets who want to hire someone to help them build their next 6-axis, servo-driven, wafer-insertion robot or their next robotic lawn mower mostly hire people with engineering degrees to do engineering. Usually, these companies wait until a student gets out of college to offer them a full-time position.

2. Colleges do teach their students to design, debug, test, and produce robots. Where was this mentioned that these were rarely covered, and by whom? Sure, there are many engineers who have not specifically studied machine design and they might not know FIRST game play, but they still are engineers. If these people are willing to help, students should show enough respect to at least hear them out. They might not be able to discuss the intricacies of a swerve drive, but at least they can teach V=IR, F=MA, and the basics of C programming.

THIS is what i have a problem with. I think this is hardly true for reasons mentioned before and because a student with experience can design amazing pieces. Two great examples are Tytus and Arefin (the first to come to mind. hope you guys don't mind) who both did great work while in college. Even Engineers with knowledge in a specific area can have trouble because they can design a otherwise amazing system but find that unless they have experience in robotics that their system just isn't practical (inappropriately weighted systems and a lack of understanding of parts limits is a primary problem) Again mentor run teams are not bad but its the generalizations that get to me. I know I'm a hypocrite in making this post and if any of you figure out why don't bother posting.

(One a side note, it's good to see that Tytus and Arefin have been leading double lives as college students. Also... ask either of them how they have learned to do some good designing. My guess is that they will say that knowledgeable engineers helped to show them how it is done.)

I am going to go out on a limb to make an assumption and offer a suggestion.

My assumption that there are engineers who are deemed "unhelpful" because they are thrown a FIRST-related technical challege during week 2 or 3 of the build season. They come up with a solution without really knowing the details of the game and after not shown a FIRST match. When these un-informed engineers give a sub-par design that might not be advantageous, students shake their heads and think "oh, he's just a engineer who doesn't know anything about robotics".

Here is my suggestion: instead of simply going to an engineer during week 2, actually bring them into your team now. Let them become part of your team. Take them to an off-season event. Invite them to your fund raising events, your bowling nights, and your fall planning sessions. Believe it or not, these engineers will probably come up with better input come build season. They might even show you something and possibly even inspire someone on your team.

Call me crazy, but this just might help your team.

Andy B.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Oz,
I have to agree with Andy on this one. My son just graduated from Bradley with an ME degree. I can tell you that not only did he have classes in robotics, but there was an entire section of the floor dedicated to robotic design and function. Manufacturing, particularly automobile building, makes extensive use of robotic devices from material handling to painting.

To DB213 Parent, listening and observing are two very real ways to judge how much to get involved. Your students will show and tell when they need help, are frustrated, tired or out of ideas. If you run into a situation where you need assistance please come here to CD to get your questions answered. I will help on anything electrical, and the other mentors who write here will help with mechanical, software, even team dynamics. You can't get a better source for info than right here. Be assured that when you are at competition, you can turn to us for help as well. Just ask.

[Alexander McGee]

Uhh im not sure i agree with this fully. Speaking strictly from actual experience being a engineer gives a mentor no advantage over a student when it come to building robotics. As mentioned in other threads robotics is rarely covered in college. In fact i know a mentor who has designed xray systems for submarine inspection yet has no clue when it came to our robots specific abilities. He was knowledgable about electrics but in plenty of cases it just didn't carry over.

I think that you need some more exposure. Engineers do nothing but this, some may just work in a different, less technical area. Engineers solve problems, that is all. We are the world's problem solvers and there are many different problems to be solved, just as there are many different kinds of engineers.

As an engineer, I work with and build robots daily. I know many many others who do too. Think about any company that sells products in the USA. These products, whatever they might be, need to be tested / packaged / organized / repaired / reconditioned / redesigned. Who do you think does all this? Certainly engineers, but they can't do every little thing 24-7. We build robots to do it for us. Take a look at this:

http://grovelandfire.org/HUGO.jpg

That is what I am talking about. This robot runs 24-7-365 in the Test Lab of R&D where I work, Stryker Instruments. We make Medical products and are required by the FDA to test and ensure that they can sustain long life. This is a life-cycle tester which automates and monitors an Autoclave (hospital sterilization) with a variety of parts in it. I can only show this to you because I made it as a freshman. I wish i could show you some of the amazing things that other people whom I work with have created.

I am not sure what you are talking about when you say that robotics is not taught in College. Which aspect of robotics are you referring to? I have had classes in machining, design, drive train, electrical, pneumatic control, and programming, (gotta love Statics, Solids, Thermo, & Heat Trans!) and I am not even a Junior yet! Maybe it is different at your school, but and engineering degree touches so many facets of robotics, that one can't begin to learn them all.

I also disagree with you about engineering mentors and their ability to help a team significantly. Look at, oh, every team that has ever been in the top 4 at Nationals. Do you think that a majority of these robots had minimal engineer involvement? Of course they had help. It is the engineers in this program who make it what it is. Without them and their ideas, it would have taken teams much longer to come up with things such as swivel drive, a 4-speed transmission, autonomous programming (before 03, if you would believe it), and everything else that has left you in awe. The students are, of course, vital to the program as well, but engineers and their ideas have made this program grow exponentially fast.

I'm not attacking you personally, I just felt that your post had some things that need to be addressed for everyone. Feel free to IM me or email me and we can chat. Also, please re-read Andy's last post. I couldn't agree with him more.

-Alex

[DB213parent]

Thanks for the warm welcome - what a terrific venue for opinions from everyone involved with FIRST.


Thanks to YOU for a truly thought-provoking post. One of the best views of the issue I've seen. It definitely summarizes things in a good way.

Welcome to Chief Delphi!
(Certainly an excellent first post, here's to many more...)

[DB213parent]

Thanks so much for your warm welcome and kind words. My email requesting entry into NEMO should already be in your box. Elaine Giacomo

[sciguy125]

Can I hear from some teams that have active parent organizations so we can find out if we're on the right track.
As it turns out, a good number of our parents are engineers. (Something about a fruit not falling far from where it started...) That means that they serve as both technical advisors and bringers of food. 1351 has decided that, as much as possible, "mentors" will only serve as "advisors". They will offer their advice, but it's ultimately up to the student who's in charge of the project to make a decision. They tend to get slightly more pushy when it comes to their own kids though. That's not to say that you have to be an engineer to help in the technical aspects of the robot. If you ask the right questions, you can help them better understand what's happening. Sometimes, just walking through a problem with someone will help them see it in a different way and may lead them to a solution. Until I got into FIRST, I didn't do much mechanical work. If someone asked me for help, I had to learn with them. Sometimes, I would ask a question that would turn on a lightbulb in their head.

Our new structure seems to indicate that this "advisor" role will be more strict. Our engineering branch is hierachry of students to manage the design and construction of the robot. From what I understand, their exact duties are still to be determined, but it's intended that the engineering leaders (high school students) have the final say in how their project is done.

Speaking strictly from actual experience being a engineer gives a mentor no advantage over a student when it come to building robotics.

I'm going to partially disagree with that. Being an engineer gives you an "advantage", but it isn't necessarily "better". From training, you have the knowledge and skills that a student doesn't have. This means you may have already run into certain problems that will come up and know how to fix them or maybe you won't make the same mistakes as a student. However, your training may cloud your vision. If you have a set way of doing something, you may not see a better way of doing it. A student, with less training, is forced to have more creativity. Something that is obvious to the student may have been blocked from the engineer's line of sight. I'm not saying that being a student is better for building a robot, just that engineers and students will each have their own views that could be better (or worse), depending on the situation.

[mechanicalbrain]

I'm going to partially disagree with that. Being an engineer gives you an "advantage", but it isn't necessarily "better". From training, you have the knowledge and skills that a student doesn't have. This means you may have already run into certain problems that will come up and know how to fix them or maybe you won't make the same mistakes as a student. However, your training may cloud your vision. If you have a set way of doing something, you may not see a better way of doing it. A student, with less training, is forced to have more creativity. Something that is obvious to the student may have been blocked from the engineer's line of sight. I'm not saying that being a student is better for building a robot, just that engineers and students will each have their own views that could be better (or worse), depending on the situation.
Which is partially why it personally irks me to see a completely mentor run program. I like to see what kids invent. Also i agree with your view on a mentors experience its just that i feel there (with exception of drive train but even that...) few experiences that are applicable to building robots. Its just one of those things where few things trully can prepare you for the unique designing process involved (especially with the time schedules).

[RogerR]

...Also i agree with your view on a mentors experience its just that i feel there are few experiences that are applicable to building robots. Its just one of those things where few things trully can prepare you for the unique designing process involved (especially with the time schedules).

i find this part of your statement very ironic. build season is meant to give you a taste of what a real engineer does. i've been working at Lear corp. for the last couple months, and it is like build season, only more so. everything we build/modify is done on a deadline, ranging from a year, to a week (Example: i had to repair a10 year old tester last week in time for them to ship out modules on friday. i had 2 days to fix it, and a day to run 180 modules) what we're doing here in FIRST is a very simplified version of what happens in the real world.

[mechanicalbrain]

Right but not everywhere is Lear. I know my dad is a aeronautical engineer and his company doesn't have to make their programs, electrics, web on top of everything else. Plus as i recall Lear is slightly larger than any teams i know of. In fact yes their are similarities and yes exceptions but still FIRST is VERY intense. All I'm saying is that a mechanical engineer has knowledge that would far surpass my own yet that doesn't mean they are better at say building a car. Anyway sorry if their some confusion. Normally when i post i just assume people understand I'm not trying to make my statements all inclusive (in fact i normally say so). From now on ill be even more clear on this.
NOTE: nothing in my posts is a given fact and only represents my opinion unless i say otherwise. I know! A little dramatic I'm just making it clear that its an opinion based on my knowledge thus subject to flaw. I still stand by it. Few companies as small as a FIRST team have to cover such a spectrum of knowledges. I understand where you come from but i think you are looking at it from the outlook of a large company. Most teams are close to 15 students.

[Dave Flowerday]

...a mentors experience its just that i feel there (with exception of drive train but even that...) few experiences that are applicable to building robots.
Clearly from this statement you have a lot to learn about engineering (and guess what - your mentors should be able to provide you that knowledge!). If you think engineers don't have experience that are applicable to building these robots then I don't think you really understand what engineering is.
All I'm saying is that a mechanical engineer has knowledge that would far surpass my own yet that doesn't mean they are better at say building a car.
Are you suggesting that someone trained in mechanical engineering is no more qualified than you to build a car??? Yikes...

If that were true, then why would GM, Ford, etc. require job candidates to have a degree? Sorry, but I wouldn't be expecting any calls from recruiters for these companies any time soon... because someone who holds a mechanical engineering degree is FAR more likely to be better at building a car than you.

----

I posted earlier about posts in this thread being borderline insulting to us engineers. Your last few posts fall into this category in my opinion. It would be interesting to see how you feel about this after you've gone though the challenging process of earning an engineering degree yourself...

[mechanicalbrain]

You missed my point entirely! I'm saying that being an engineer in a specific field does NOT give you intimate knowledge of everything that field involves. Of course GM requires people applying to have degrees but does that mean that all mechanical engineer knows a car like the back of his or her hand NO of course not. As mentioned in other threads few colleges have open robotics courses and even fewer do robots to the scale we do (Their are small groups on most colleges that do advanced robotics but these are rarely open courses). You could get your mechanical engineering degree without ever having touched a robot. Anyway this conversation is veering from the thread so either we start a new thread or feel free to drop me a message.

[Dave Flowerday]

You missed my point entirely! ... but does that mean that all mechanical engineer knows a car like the back of his or her hand NO of course not.
That's not what you said. You said that "a mechanical engineer has knowledge that would far surpass my own yet that doesn't mean they are better at say building a car" to which I replied (and maintain) that most likely they ARE better at building a car.
You could get your mechanical engineering degree without ever having touched a robot.
You're misunderstanding the purpose of an engineering education. An engineering education is primarily about 2 things: learning a foundation of fundamental concepts (equations, theory, etc) and learning how to learn (because on any engineering job, you WILL need to learn additional skills beyond what you were taught in school). Learning to be a mechanical engineer does not teach you how specifically to build a robot, just like it does not teach you specifically how to build a car, or design a manufacturing machine, or a product housing, etc.

An engineering education is about the concepts and skills that apply to any engineering project. Your argument is that a mechanical engineering education (and, by extension, any other engineering education) is not relevant to building robots because they don't teach you how to build a robot in school. The point that you're missing is that nearly ALL of the concepts that are learned while pursuing an engineering education are applicable and relevant when building FIRST robots.

[Arefin Bari]

Two great examples are Tytus and Arefin (the first to come to mind. hope you guys don't mind) who both did great work while in college.

Thank you Chris for pointing us out. I have a long way to go. But I haven't accomplished nothing close to what a lot have. I can't speak for Tytus, we may have worked together, traveled together, but we come from our own different background. We learn stuff our own way.

I just started college. I haven't accomplished nothing compared to many. I wouldn't be where I am right now if it wasn't because of my mentors. Team 108 mentors has always been there for me. Even though these two engineers weren't from my team, they took the mentor role in my life... Andy and John. Do give credit to the mentors, because they make you who you are. Maybe you won't realize it now (just like I didn't back in my sophomore year in high school), but you will realize it the night you sit down and design a transmission and you face a lot of problems. You will be able to solve them just because your mentors were there to teach you how to solve it.

There are still teams in FIRST I know, who don't have any mentors. Do you know how bad they crave for one? I do, because I know I wouldn't even bother to sit infront of the laptop with inventor open and try to design cool things. In order to design the cool thing, you need to know how to design it. Thats when an Engineer/mentor comes in. As a teenager (ya, I was pretty dumb) I used to not listen to anyone or not pay attention. But as time passed by, I learned to listen, to pay attention, to learn. It helps.

Yes, lectures can be boring... actually very boring (I go through 4 lectures, 3 days a week for college, I would know) but I do learn things from this.

Now I am sitting here thinking, 4 years back if I was reading this post made by some college student, I would say something like "why is he posting it... why is he even bothering to tell me stuff like this. I know enough."

From Tytus and I: We learned how to manufacture parts because our mentors were there for us and helped us learn how to use all the machinery. We learned how to design a transmission by looking at many different transmission that were posted right here on chiefdelphi by the mentors and the engineers. You think we came up with those idea? Nope... it was all designed and built... all we did was took the idea... modified it a bit and make it work. All the dog shifters in FIRST has the basic concept? are they all same? no...

What are we both trying to point out...

We are trying to tell everyone that we are Arefin and Tytus because of the mentors. We like to thank every single one of you mentors for being there for us. In 4/5 years, we will be still here with our degree on our hand helping as many teams out as possible.

P.s. - While I was posting this, Tytus was talking to me on Teamspeak. We both shared our opinion.

[Tytus Gerrish]

Thank you Chris for pointing us out. I have a long way to go. But I haven't accomplished nothing close to what a lot have. I can't speak for Tytus, we may have worked together, traveled together, but we come from our own different background. We learn stuff our own way.

I just started college. I haven't accomplished nothing compared to many. I wouldn't be where I am right now if it wasn't because of my mentors. Team 108 mentors has always been there for me. Even though these two engineers weren't from my team, they took the mentor role in my life... Andy and John. Do give credit to the mentors, because they make you who you are. Maybe you won't realize it now (just like I didn't back in my sophomore year in high school), but you will realize it the night you sit down and design a transmission and you face a lot of problems. You will be able to solve them just because your mentors were there to teach you how to solve it.

There are still teams in FIRST I know, who don't have any mentors. Do you know how bad they crave for one? I do, because I know I wouldn't even bother to sit infront of the laptop with inventor open and try to design cool things. In order to design the cool thing, you need to know how to design it. Thats when an Engineer/mentor comes in. As a teenager (ya, I was pretty dumb) I used to not listen to anyone or not pay attention. But as time passed by, I learned to listen, to pay attention, to learn. It helps.

Yes, lectures can be boring... actually very boring (I go through 4 lectures, 3 days a week for college, I would know) but I do learn things from this.

Now I am sitting here thinking, 4 years back if I was reading this post made by some college student, I would say something like "why is he posting it... why is he even bothering to tell me stuff like this. I know enough."

From Tytus and I: We learned how to manufacture parts because our mentors were there for us and helped us learn how to use all the machinery. We learned how to design a transmission by looking at many different transmission that were posted right here on chiefdelphi by the mentors and the engineers. You think we came up with those idea? Nope... it was all designed and built... all we did was took the idea... modified it a bit and make it work. All the dog shifters in FIRST has the basic concept? are they all same? no...

What are we both trying to point out...

We are trying to tell everyone that we are Arefin and Tytus because of the mentors. We like to thank every single one of you mentors for being there for us. In 4/5 years, we will be still here with our degree on our hand helping as many teams out as possible.

P.s. - While I was posting this, Tytus was talking to me on Teamspeak. We both shared our opinion.

Can i get and Amen!!!!

seriously i just started college, and i wouldn't know the stuff or have Done anything i have done if it wasn't for the mentors like Chet and Dan letting me take the parts home and mess around with them. and get me a copy of autocad, and actually put me behind the glass As a freshman driver. it's all thanks to them. and when everything expanded with chiefdelphi all the mentors on here were there for me too pushing me along even more. Now that CD media is up i searched all the things i have uploaded and everything i see i see some element that wouldn't be there without a mentor. the fact is that i have been very fortunate being on 179 and Being here on chiefdelphi. Many teams Don't Even Have one mentor Just a teacher and no experience in first and honestly its not fair. mentors are very important and no this Rarly can't be done without them.

[JVN]

You missed my point entirely! I'm saying that being an engineer in a specific field does NOT give you intimate knowledge of everything that field involves.

On 229, we taught our students:
"Engineering is Problem Solving."
"Engineers solve problems using the Engineering Design Process."

When you get a degree in engineering, you are being taught how to solve problems in a professional, methodical manner. This approach to problem solving through analysis and design is what makes an engineer an engineer. You are being taught how to find the tools you need to solve these problems.

As mentioned in other threads few colleges have open robotics courses... you could get your mechanical engineering degree without ever having touched a robot.

You can NOT get a mechanical engineering degree without learning how to solve problems like an engineer. This knowledge is the tool which grants engineers an "advantage" when it comes to participating in the FIRST program.

Your argument is flawed if you believe that if an engineer hasn't had a robotics course, then they haven't learned distinct skills that will help them in FIRST. (I have emphasized problem solving as a primary skill, but there are many more.)

The FRC design process is highly accelerated and very challenging, no one will argue with this. However the FIRST program is a strong parallel to industry. For you to imply that it is somehow "unique" enough that an engineer has no means for comparison outside of FIRST, is foolish.

Heck, I'll come right out and say it:
You are foolish to think that engineers do not have an "advantage" in FIRST. They do.

Who would best program my robot?

Dave Flowerday - Motorola Enginerd
Some HS kid who plays with C in his spare time
Who would best design my robot's gearbox?

Paul Copioli - FANUC Robotics Enginerd
Ken Patton - GM Enginerd
Arefin Bari - HS-FIRST-All-Star
(Sorry Ary, I think Ken and Paul beat you out.)

But...
I bet Arefin wants to be like the Copiolster when he grows up, and THAT is what FIRST is all about.
Seeing the advantage, understanding the advantage. "Wow, so if I learn my trig, I can do THAT!?!"

I want to be like Paul, Ken & Flowerday,
JV

[Arefin Bari]

[/list]Who would best design my robot's gearbox?

Paul Copioli - FANUC Robotics Enginerd
Ken Patton - GM Engineerd
Arefin Bari - HS-FIRST-All-Star
(Sorry Ary, I think Ken and Paul beat you out.)

But...
I bet Arefin wants to be like the Copiolster when he grows up, and THAT is what FIRST is all about.
Seeing the advantage, understanding the advantage. "Wow, so if I learn my trig, I can do THAT!?!"

I want to be like Paul, Ken & Flowerday,
JV

Darn proud of it to say that I would lose to Paul and Ken but you know what the advantage is still mine. I am learning, they already know how to do it. woooo :)

[sciguy125]

...its just that i feel there (with exception of drive train but even that...) few experiences that are applicable to building robots.
I understand where you're coming from. Nothing you learn can truly prepare you for everything that comes your way. One of our teachers (if you happen to read this, I apologize in advance) worked as an engineer for a very long time. It's my understanding that he was even a project manager for some time. I think he specialized in control systems. It is obvious that he has had plenty of experience and training. When it came to FIRST control systems, he didn't know how they worked. Hobby PWM is evidently not the same as traditional PWM. There were also a few other things that were new to him that I can't think of off the top of my head this late at night. The point is, however, that he still had the learn the system like everyone else. I, on the other hand, fresh out of high school, in my first semester of college, with "ENGR 10 - Introduction to Engineering" as the only engineering class under my belt, already understood a good deal of the system. I had been playing with hobby r/c equipment for some time. I had done some prior research on PICs. In general, I knew more about how to use the system than he did. (again, if you are reading this, i apologize and mean no offence...and yes, I may be slightly exaggerating)

As I pointed out in my previous post I don't completely agree with Oz's point of view on engineers' FIRST capabilities. My above statements are merely my interpretation of his opinion. Oz, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I see where he is coming from and understand how he may have a valid argument. But, again, I don't fully agree.

Well then, to what extent do I agree with Oz? I agree that nothing can prepare you for every situation you find yourself in. Sometimes, you'll have to learn something new. But I don't agree that being an engineer is not an advantage. As JVN and a few others pointed out, the work done to receive an engineering degree is designed to teach you how to think like an engineer, not teach you every skill you will ever need. I wholly agree with this. It's not possible to learn everything. Instead, you learn how to learn what you will need later. (Something about teaching a man to capture aquatic wildlife rather than giving him food for today) To this extent being an engineer does give you an advantage. However, as I also pointed out in my previous post, this isn't necessarily a good thing. (By saying that, I don't mean that it's a bad thing.) Some of the greatest innovations are from people that looked outside of the box. Take Relativity for instance. That's so far out of the box that you can't even see the box if you're sitting next to Relativity. "Hey, look Bob! If I move at 0.99c, time slows down and I get shorter!" If you don't have any training, you can more easily think outsize the box; mainly because you don't know that the box exists. (Don't try to argue that Einstein had training, because that's not what I'm trying to say.)

I'm not saying that all of us engineers should go out and trade places with an artist to ensure that we won't have any training in our new fields. It's just that a lack of experience isn't always a bad thing. As long as you're not trying to disassemble a bomb, you shouldn't feel bad about not knowing what you're doing. I'm also not saying that we should abolish mentorship (is that the right word? actually, is that even a real word?) and let the students run free. My personal view on this whole thing is that mentors should be there to help, not lecture. If someone runs into trouble, they should have a place to go for advice, but not have someone force knowledge into their head or take over their project. I'm not completely sure, but I suspect that this is what Oz was trying to get at.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

I agree that nothing can prepare you for every situation you find yourself in. Sometimes, you'll have to learn something new. But I don't agree that being an engineer is not an advantage.

Change that to "All the time" or "everyday" and you are close to what an engineer goes through each day. Force yourself now, today, to learn one new thing each day. When you lay down on your fluffy pillow at night, before you say your prayers, ask yourself if you have learned anything new. If the answer is "NO" then you better get up and find something. It is not the engineering that makes an Andy Baker, Paul C, Ken or JVN, it's the other knowledge too. If you ask a pointed question you will find that each mentor has found themselves a better engineer due to the constraints of this "game". I know that my coworkers wonder how I come up with some of the solutions I plan out. I know it is due to my involvement in FIRST.
As to engineers having an advantage in this robot competition, there is no doubt. We know it because of our experiences. You don't realize it yet, but you will. I can only ask that you open your minds a little and see things as they are. Step out of your body and come over to my side of the computer and see things from here. Yea, it's hard to do that, but give it a try. You have been doing hard things for a while, I challenge you to look at it from our point of view. Here is a little hint, each one of the engineers in this thread and most if not all of the engineers in this program want to teach you, help you and yes sometimes push you, to do your best. We are not going to be 100% successful getting you to be an engineer, but you you still have the potential to do great things. You have already taken the first few steps. With your eyes open, there are wonders to behold, keep them closed and all you will do is bump into walls.

[Jessica Boucher]

Is it just me, or did we recently take a sharp left into "Off-topic Land"? (No offense, they are excellent arguments, but I don't get the connection to Baker's original post, and if someone can explain it to me I would be happy to listen).

Baker, I think you have your answer already. Through the last few pages of conversation, it seems to be apparent that through this discussion people accept that although we may not completely agree on how teams should be run, there are a lot of different teams out there, and not one is better than the other because their methods (and thus, their priorities) are different. Many people made this point long before I ever thought of posting in here.

I was once asked what business model I thought FIRST was. In my opinion, it is two-fold: HQ in relationship to team leadership is a B2B (Business-to-Business). Just like your local coffee shop buys cups from a supplier, teams are paying for FIRST to give them a kit of parts and a means to inspire their local youth in a unique way (the competitions themselves).
However, team leadership to the students is a B2C (Business-to-Consumer). Just like you buy a cup of coffee from your local coffee shop, the team leadership is providing something to the student that the supplier can not do as effectively on its own - inspiring the student.
Back to the coffee shop example, there is no one way that selling coffee is fulfilling to the shop owner. You have establishments that thrive on product quality, some that focus on profit, others that make money off of ambiance, and even others that have a strong local following. All have different views of success. Similarly, you have teams that consider themselves successful that have varying student-mentor mixes.

So, what does that all mean?

Trust me, I would love to track team statistics to figure out the most effective mix of team aspects and encourage teams to adhere to said guidelines, because it may do a lot towards team retention. But that's not how FIRST works.
FIRST's competitive advantage to the rest of their industry segment is it's openness for innovative thought. FIRST isn't in the curriculum business - they're not promising in January that by May your students on the team will learn A B and C. FIRST is offering team leadership a chance to uniquely inspire their students to go into science or technology-based careers. How does that happen on a team level? It's up to the team leadership to think of the best way for that to happen in their area. And that's (one of the reasons) why FIRST is the Hardest Fun Ever, not only for the students, but for everyone involved.

Why do some teams feel strongly about one method over another? Conditioning. What they are exposed to goes a long way to shape their opinion on the matter. As it has also been shown here, as teams get older, people (and perceptions) change. Part of these changes are because of discussions that increase exposure...discussions just like this one.
All we can really do in terms of this discussion is keep talking about our different perspectives and celebrating that the differences still achieve the same goal.

[mechanicalbrain]

As I pointed out in my previous post I don't completely agree with Oz's point of view on engineers' FIRST capabilities. My above statements are merely my interpretation of his opinion. Oz, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I see where he is coming from and understand how he may have a valid argument. But, again, I don't fully agree.
Actually your example is what i was trying to convey. Engineers are brilliant! They have to be! But brilliance sometimes doesn't compare to specific experience. All i want ed to say was that someone who has a good deal of experience in a field will probably be better at it than an unexperienced Engineer. I don't know what everyone else took it but that really is it.

So back to Mr. Baker's thread. I think teams will participate in robotics without technical mentors either because they don't have access to one or because they don't want one. I have not met a team that didn't want help from mentors so i assume most teams fit in the first category. Technically speaking you CAN build a robot without any mentor help (Its hard but the kits were made to be easy to some degree). I'm not saying they will have an amazing bot (though they could) but it can be done. If any team has enough interest in robotics to make a robot and compete without any technical mentors i say that they have some amazing devotion. I'm curious if anyone who actually knows some teams or on some with no technical mentors.

[computer411]

I am part of a team that had no technical advisors for the first year. We completely designed and built OUR robot. We were proud of it and had no complaints and no regrets. We saw the competition as a learning experience, not Solely as a competition. I have found through my travels that the mentors are not just mentors. They help with the design, building, and troubleshooting of a robot. I saw one team whose robot had an electrical issue, and the mentors were the one fixing the robot, while the students were fooling around. I could say that that first year we were them ones fixing our robot when an error occurred, no matter what system it affected, in fact because we had designed our own system, the adults had no idea how to fix it. The FRC is a high school event, made to bring out new engineers and techs for today's world, not a place for ADULT engineers to duke out robots against each other.They are there only to help the teams out, not to completely design the robot which most of the time happens with a team that has technical advisors.

[KenWittlief]

...They (engineers) are there only to help the teams out, not to completely design the robot which most of the time happens with a team that has technical advisors.

I think you need a little more exposure to the entire FIRST community, if this is your impression of what happens most of the time.

Over the years I have noticed that rookie teams often fall into a pattern where the sponsor and mentors think FIRST is a robot competition - they think they have to build a really spiffy and competitive robot so the higher-ups in the company will not be embarrassed to have the corporate name on it

very often rookie teams will end up with an all-mentor designed and built robot. Then they get to their first FIRST regional, meet other teams, talk to other students and mentors, and somewhere over the 3 days it clicks

and then they 'get it'.

Getting back to the rest of your post: sometimes in our human experience there are things that we dont know, and we also dont know that we dont know - there are many things that are only learned as we bump along through life, through experience, then over the years we understand what it was that happened.

and heres the thing: no matter how intelligent you are, you cant forsee these things - you can possibly anticipate them - they come out of nowhere - you dont know that you dont know about these things

thats one of the real values of mentorship. Throughout most of human history young people learned by apprenticeship, working side by side with someone who had years of experience and training.

[sanddrag]

There is definitely something to be said for the teams with students who know every in and out of their robot because they built it themselves. However, at the same time, I think they are cheating themselves out of the rewarding experience of working with real professionals.

[Chris Fultz]

The FRC is a high school event, made to bring out new engineers and techs for today's world

From the FIRST website...

The FIRST Robotics Competition is an exciting, multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way.

The program is not intended to be a high school event. It is intended to be a partnership between students and adults.

I had a college professor that once said there are three kinds of knowledge -

What you know
What you know you don't know
and
What you don't know you don't know

I think teams trying to work with no mentoring are in that third category and don't know what benefit they would receive from a good technical mentor.

**

FIRST is a great representation of many technical companies. Just like the FIRST plan of an engineer mentoring a student, we would never hand a new engineer a clean sheet of paper and say 'go design a new compressor, I will be back in a few weeks'. We would have that new engineer work with an experienced design engineer and learn what to do and how to do it. Corporate knowledge is passed on and the knowledge base continues to grow and that is how technical advancements continue.

[Alexander McGee]

From the FIRST website...

The FIRST Robotics Competition is an exciting, multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way.

The program is not intended to be a high school event. It is intended to be a partnership between students and adults.

I had a college professor that once said there are three kinds of knowledge -

What you know
What you know you don't know
and
What you don't know you don't know

I think teams trying to work with no mentoring are in that third category and don't know what benefit they would receive from a good technical mentor.

**

FIRST is a great representation of many technical companies. Just like the FIRST plan of an engineer mentoring a student, we would never hand a new engineer a clean sheet of paper and say 'go design a new compressor, I will be back in a few weeks'. We would have that new engineer work with an experienced design engineer and learn what to do and how to do it. Corporate knowledge is passed on and the knowledge base continues to grow and that is how technical advancements continue.


Chris, I agree with your post. However, there are other kinds of "Adult Mentors" besides technical ones. There have been many successful teams without engineers on board, and there are many many many people who mentor in this program who are not engineers. No team can be run without adults; high school students can not manage a team without credit and other things that adults take care of "behind the scenes".

I agree that engineers are a wonderful thing in this program, however, I personally feel that some of them do not know where to "draw the line" and let the students get involved. I speak from personal experience.

However, in the end, it doesn't really matter. I was able to be inspired from being on a team dominated by paid engineers, and my students are inspired on my team which has none. As it has been said countless times in this thread, please understand that teams run things differently for specific and very valid reasons. And, this is OK as long as the students are inspired.

I have a high respect for engineers in this program. Many of the people whom I work with would never be able to dedicate half the time that people like you do to this program. Thanks for keeping us inspired guys!

[phrontist]

The fact that thread is still raging speaks volumes. Obviously, there is a serious rift in the F.I.R.S.T. community. It seems (to me) to break down in to two real stances pragmatically, regardless of which of the (numerous) supporting rationales are being used:


It is acceptable and commendable for teams to feild a robot that is, in part or in whole, designed by non-student team members.
F.I.R.S.T. robots should be designed by students, with non-students in supporting roles that are not-directly involved in design.


Questions of manufacturing are a whole other debate (is buying sub-assembiles from AndyMark kosher?) and should remain seperate from this issue. In my view what it comes down to is the balance between "inspiration" and "recognition". So there are two questions here:


Does allowing engineers to design FIRST robots further the goal of inspiring students to pursue Math/Science/Engineering careers?
Does allowing engineers to design FIRST robots further the goal of recognizing student accomplishments in the engineering challenge that is FIRST?


I think the former question is debatable, students being corrected by engineers or observing the thought process of engineers as they engineer solutions to these (fairly easy) problems is arguably more or less inspiring then allowing students to do it alone (with engineers providing lessons at a higher level, or not at all). But I can see no argument in the latter question! How can you recognize students for the performance of a robot they were only paritally responsible for? It robs non-engineer teams of any sort of fair competition. How can I be expected to beat out a professional engineers robot (I still intend to, mind you ;))? Should a debatable vehicle for inspiration come at the price of recognition?

Working as an intern in what is now our primary sponsor has given me the chance to work closely with engineers, having my designs critiqued because I (as a mere high-school student) cannot be unsupervised in implementing production code. No doubt, this is a valuable experience. But working on my team, which has no engineering mentors, has been an equally valuable experience in an entirely different way. The team sinks or swims based on how well the students work together and know their stuff. I derive a great deal of pride whenever our team wins, because it really is us, the students, winning. Our (non-engineering) mentors are fantastic, plying us with sage wisdom and keeping us organized to some extent, but I'm glad it stops there. Our mentors are there to bounce ideas off of, not to dictate designs from on high.

Some have advocated that each team should be allowed to run things as they wish. I feel that sort of liberty should always be strived for. However the pro-engineer design teams limit the freedom of the opposing camp by altering the nature of the competition. You simply cannot have a fair competition of student wits with engineer designed robots on the feild. FIRST needs engineers, not engineer designed robots.

The program is not intended to be a high school event. It is intended to be a partnership between students and adults.

It's the nature of that partnership that is all important, and to my knowledge, unspecified by FIRST. If it is, I'd love to hear it, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for change. FIRST is it's participants, and should change as the people change.

[Cuog]

In My Opinion a team should be run by the students. The students should begin the design and the Mentors job should be to keep the students on the right path and provide ideas/suggestions when the students dont know what they should do. I as a student dont like to see a team that has had no help from there mentors or has no mentors to ask for help. What also bothers me is when it is the mentors that do everything and the students only know from what the mentors have told them about the robot.

Our team is a small one(20 something students getting near 30 now) with only 2 real mentors, as well as some parents that help out when we need them. I like our team the way that it is larger teams cause each student to have less and less to do, as it is during build season we always have at least 2 people sitting and doing nothing at any particular point in time.

Well I've said my piece but feel free to think what you want,
Cuog

[Ellery]

I guess I have to jump on this thread band wagon like everyone else even though it's a few months late but I guess I should at least voice my opinion.

First of all, everyone should just take deep breath and relax since some people seem to be too adamant about their views on this issue. Remember that most of us mentors here are volunteers and we're participating in this to help give back to our community while having FUN doing it! (If I didn't have fun or enjoy meeting all the FIRST participants do you think I'd be spending more time on this program than work and my family put togther?) Every team has their own way of making their team work due to different environments and resources. There is no one right way. Balance is the key based on what's available.

Second, Keep in mind the main point of FIRST and it's motto "to inspire" and "partner with professionals". As long as your team even achieves to inspire a single person into a technological field or not that's great! NOT you say! what the hell am I talking about? Well I for one believe life is one big decision making process and if I can inspire someone to become an engineer Awesome but if that person realizes that this is not for him/her that's great too. I want to give the students at least the choice prior to college to make that decision instead of wasting time and $$$ and then find out it was not for them and switch majors completely or not even go to college. FIRST is just another program to give students more experience to allow them to make the right decisions for themselves.

As for "partnerships", I can care less if it's with engineers from a high tech company or your local machine shop. They are professionals none-the-less. I would have killed to get this opportunity when I was in HS but I had to wait till I got to college to really find out, and I'm glad I actually love what I do as a mechanical engineer. It's another reason why internships in many careers are available. If I didn't intern at the Federal State Supreme court one summer for a judge I wouldn't have known how boring it really was to me. But at least I worked within the legal system and professionals to gain the experiece to make up my mind.

As far as who designs and builds the robot I say as long as the whole team is involved in the process it doesn't really matter. Our team motto includes that we are a "back to basics team". Out of the 14 years of doing this (7 years personally) we've always focused on "Fit Form & function" and the FIRST objective. As a team you have to choose what path you want to take based on the ever changing resources to reach your goals.

If all our students are able to take every responsibility from every mentor on the team and prove to be the driving force I'd welcome it whole heartedly. I wouldn't mind just showing up to meetings and just answering questions with my feet up on the table but that is not the case pending the type of students and their personalilties. We actively recruit students who we believe would receive the most benefit from this program. For example if someone is already set on a particular career path then they will not be ultimately benefited by this program.

Oh well I could babble on and on about this and the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything but I realized I've become too overly engrossed in this thread which I really shouldn't be.

Ellery

[KenWittlief]

I had a college professor that once said there are three kinds of knowledge -

What you know
What you know you don't know
and
What you don't know you don't know



he forgot two:

what you think you know, but you dont
what you think you dont know, but you actually do :^)

[Chaos204]

However, at the same time, I think they are cheating themselves out of the rewarding experience of working with real professionals.

There is also something that a student run team gets that heavily mentored teams will never have and will never understand.
I have been told, the best way to learn is to learn through mistakes.
the mentors that are active in the pits are depriving the students from the experience that is needed to be successful.

i will now make 2 killer analogies. Ready?

1. Besides Robotics my other life is what we call in our school sound and light(we are the people in the back of the theater balancing the Mic's and programing the lights) my "mentor" allows us (the students) to do the balancing of the Mic's so we develop the hearing that allows us to hear subtle rings in the voices before the audience does. This prepares us to be the mentors someday and be able to work without him guiding us every second.
which brings me to #2

2. When parents are raising a child or teachers teaching young students in preschool and kindergarten[or a councler at camp (in my case)] they allow the kids to explore their world and to figure out how to open doors and tie their shoes. If the teacher does not give them that freedom the child will become dependent on the teacher.

I hope you see the parallels.

Not only do engineer teams loose the trial/error aspect they most likely loose the pride i feel when i see our creation out there on the field.
everybody on the team knows how everything works and what it took to get it there in the first place. it's our "Blood Sweat and Tears" out there on the field.

I hope when we are done on this thread all teams will find a happy medium where the students do the building and have the mistakes that prepare them all while under the watchful and experienced mentor who wants the best learning experience for the students.

[Andy Baker]

Questions of manufacturing are a whole other debate (is buying sub-assembiles from AndyMark kosher?) and should remain seperate from this issue.

Keep in mind that "sub-assemblies from AndyMark" could be replaced with "screws from Fastenal", "wheels from MSC" or "car jacks from your local junkyard". Why single out AndyMark, Inc.?

I think the former question is debatable, students being corrected by engineers or observing the thought process of engineers as they engineer solutions to these (fairly easy) problems is arguably more or less inspiring then allowing students to do it alone (with engineers providing lessons at a higher level, or not at all). But I can see no argument in the latter question! How can you recognize students for the performance of a robot they were only paritally responsible for?

If all participating FIRST students were like you, Bjorn, then I would agree with your logic. You already "get" the fact that you need to further your education and you already know that you will end up in some sort of technical career when you enter the workplace. You probably score between 700 and 800 on the math portion of your SAT's. You have good work experience and are probably graduating high in your class. Colleges are lining up to recruit you to come study on their campus. Also, in order to build a competitive FIRST robot, you don't depend on any adult professionals. You really don't need FIRST to inspire you to become a technical whiz.

Believe it or not, many students are not like you. They actually need help to build a competitive robot. To many of them (and us adult mentors), this is a difficult design challenge. They need resources in fabrication, design, and team leadership. They don't have a dad who owns his own engineering firm. Some of these students don't even know what an engineer is. Their only heros are sports figures. For many, FIRST is introducing engineering to them for the first time. I estimate that most FIRST students fit into this category.

You simply cannot have a fair competition of student wits with engineer designed robots on the feild. FIRST needs engineers, not engineer designed robots.

It's the nature of that partnership that is all important, and to my knowledge, unspecified by FIRST. If it is, I'd love to hear it, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for change. FIRST is it's participants, and should change as the people change.

As quoted many time by the FIRST founders, FIRST is a partnership between students and adults. It is also defined here (http://www.usfirst.org/about/index.html). The fact that you don't agree with this does not justify your demand that FIRST should change to meet your likes. This partnership and involvement from adult engineers is the foundation of FIRST. This is not a competition to only pit students' wits against each other. It never has been. If that is what you seek there are plenty of other great programs offered to satisfy your needs. I suggest you look into these programs instead of changing FIRST for your liking.


Andy B.

[santosh]

Having a fully built student robot is very commendable in my opinion.
I personally would be happier with a robot that was built by the students at Wheeler High School and the help of the students at GT that didn't do so hot vs. a robot that was built by a set of engineers that did well.

Would I personally be inspired by engineers building my teams bot? Not really.

Would I be inspired by the fact that a group of students could put together a functioning robot. Yes. Maybe thats just me.

To me, as long as I am having fun, then everything is fine with me.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

I have been told, the best way to learn is to learn through mistakes.

1. Besides Robotics my other life is what we call in our school sound and light(we are the people in the back of the theater balancing the Mic's and programing the lights) my "mentor" allows us (the students) to do the balancing of the Mic's so we develop the hearing that allows us to hear subtle rings in the voices before the audience does. This prepares us to be the mentors someday and be able to work without him guiding us every second.
which brings me to #2


Not only do engineer teams loose the trial/error aspect they most likely loose the pride i feel when i see our creation out there on the field.
everybody on the team knows how everything works and what it took to get it there in the first place. it's our "Blood Sweat and Tears" out there on the field.

Jordan,
I have said my piece earlier in this thread but I had to jump in and give a little bit more.
The best way to learn is not through mistakes. It is far better ( and more efficient) to learn through other's mistakes and that's what mentors are doing. They are providing the benefit of their experience and passing it on to the students. If you were to exist just on trial and error without any benefit of past experience you could "wander around in the desert" forever and never come up with the solution. Man has made it this far by not reinventing the wheel every time a new idea comes into his head.
On the subject of mic mixing and feedback prevention, a mentor who lets you "do it yourself" so that you can hear the subtleties leading to feedback has fallen far short of a very complex discussion on the subject. Things that affect feedback are not only mix related but include the acoustics of the hall, mic selection, room equalization and a little thing known as NOM. There are spaces in existence that can never be corrected and there are mic that can be used in a great acoustic space that cannot be "mixed" to sound good or guarantee no feedback. As a student of this art for a very long time, I can tell you that I am still learning as are most of my peers, because sound science is still in it's infancy.
Finally, all teams take pride in their robot, but it is easy to become down heartened when you think you have done everything correctly and the robot still does not act or react as you think. Over the years, many teams without engineer mentors have asked for my help at competitions. They did have most of the problems solved but missed one or two minor points in design or implementation. Oh, if an engineer had just spent one or two hours with that team before competition, their experience could have been more positive. (for instance, when the FIRST tranny came out, it was very sensitive to friction caused by misalignment of gears and shafts) This advice did not need to come from an engineer, just someone with the experience to identify the problem.

[ChrisH]

Oh, if an engineer had just spent one or two hours with that team before competition, their experience could have been more positive. (for instance, when the FIRST tranny came out, it was very sensitive to friction caused by misalignment of gears and shafts) This advice did not need to come from an engineer, just someone with the experience to identify the problem.

A couple of years ago, a sophomore team in our area was having a problem building their robot. They put out a call for help here on CD. After several e-mails back and forth over a period of several days, I was still unable to visualize the problem and they still had not solved it. So I arranged to go out to their shop to actually see what the problem was and what their resources were.

Within ten minutes of my arrival, we had used equipment they had in a way they hadn't thought of to accomplish the solution. I spent another hour or so there and helped them with two or three more minor issues, mostly because it was an hour each way and I really didn't feel like getting back in the car yet.

If I hadn't helped them they would have been dead in the water. No progress had been made for several days while they tried to work out this problem. Some how at that point I don't think they needed to spend anymore trial and error time. They did have an alternate solution, which probably would have rendered CNC'd parts useless. I'll bet they wouldn't have forgotten that lesson either ...

BTW they won the Xerox award for their robot at our regional. Somehow I don't think the aid I rendered made it any less their robot.

[Chaos204]

The best way to learn is not through mistakes. It is far better ( and more efficient) to learn through other's mistakes and that's what mentors are doing. They are providing the benefit of their experience and passing it on to the students. If you were to exist just on trial and error without any benefit of past experience you could "wander around in the desert" forever and never come up with the solution. Man has made it this far by not reinventing the wheel every time a new idea comes into his head.

On the subject of mic mixing and feedback prevention, a mentor who lets you "do it yourself" so that you can hear the subtleties leading to feedback has fallen far short of a very complex discussion on the subject. Things that affect feedback are not only mix related but include the acoustics of the hall, mic selection, room equalization and a little thing known as NOM. There are spaces in existence that can never be corrected and there are mic that can be used in a great acoustic space that cannot be "mixed" to sound good or guarantee no feedback. As a student of this art for a very long time, I can tell you that I am still learning as are most of my peers, because sound science is still in it's infancy.
Finally, all teams take pride in their robot, but it is easy to become down heartened when you think you have done everything correctly and the robot still does not act or react as you think. Over the years, many teams without engineer mentors have asked for my help at competitions.

Your point is well taken and you have said more or less what i was alluding to in the usefulness of an experienced mentor.
I don't believe you need to make the mistakes for yourself i mean more along the lines of a mentor being responsible enough to tell why something does not work and what will go wrong to make sure the student understands the inner workings.

It is ludicrous to reinvent the wheel when the wheel is made :yikes: but when inventing a new wheel it is better to do it with the experience of your peers and mentors

I have a larger problem when a team talks about sending the gearboxes to be professionally machined

It is nice to see a fellow Sound Technician here. You got me wrong in my explanation of how he teaches us. He is a physics teacher and spares no gruesome detail in explaining what sound is and what effects it(hall, Mic, and room equalization) we do talk about what could cause a problem like the hiss of a bad cable or a bad Mic or the Tin Can syndrome as we call it. I just did not feel the need to go into the technical aspects of it but it is true you can never finish learning.

[Karthik]

If all participating FIRST students were like you, Bjorn, then I would agree with your logic. You already "get" the fact that you need to further your education and you already know that you will end up in some sort of technical career when you enter the workplace. You probably score between 700 and 800 on the math portion of your SAT's. You have good work experience and are probably graduating high in your class. Colleges are lining up to recruit you to come study on their campus. Also, in order to build a competitive FIRST robot, you don't depend on any adult professionals. You really don't need FIRST to inspire you to become a technical whiz.


People should listen to this Andy Baker character, he seems like a smart guy...

Andy has hit the nail firmly on the head. When I look at these forums, I see some the best and brightest high school students from across North America. As Andy stated, students like Bjorn are near the tops of their classes and already on the fast track to higher education. These students are not a random sample of FIRST. The problem in North America today that FIRST is trying to solve, is that kids don't see the value in becoming an engineer. They don't look up to engineers as role models, it's just another boring career. FIRST was created to change these attitudes, and create a culture where engineers and scientists are valued, and treated like role models. That why this competition was conceived the way it was. By bringing adult engineers into High Schools, kids are able to be inspired by the work that these men and women do. Students who normally wouldn't give engineering a second thought, are now seeing engineers in action. Suddenly, they think to themselves, "Hey that's cool. Maybe I want to do that. Maybe I should take pre calc..."

If you don't have adult technical mentors, this inspiration process can't happen. Dean's said it before, and it's been repeated many times, but it clearly hasn't sunk in yet, so I'll say really loudly.

FIRST is not a science fair!

The FRC is not about determining which high school as the smartest aspiring engineers. Yes, it's not fair to have a bunch high school students on one team competing against a bunch of professional engineers. Clearly the team of professionals is at an advantage. But, it would be silly to exclude them, because they're directly addressing the mission of FIRST, and helping to achieve the desired culture change.

For all those students on teams who have voluntarily given up adult technical support, just remember that not all high school students know much about engineering. In fact, most don't even care about it. Just because you've already been hooked, doesn't mean that everyone else has. Just because you're ready to build a competitive robot on your own, doesn't mean that every other High Schooler is. These kids need to be wowed and inspired, and that's what the adults in FIRST are trying to do. To try and eliminate engineer led teams just so you can have a "fair student competition" is completely selfish. As Andy stated, if that's what you're looking for there are many other competitions out there for you.

I've seen many student only teams do very well over the years. It's not impossible. These teams are a welcome part of FIRST. Each team needs to be tailored to needs, wants and abilities of their students. Just remember just because one shoe fits you, doesn't mean it's going to fit everyone else. And trying to get everyone to wear the same sized shoe in the interest of fairness, is quite frankly, silly.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

It is nice to see a fellow Sound Technician here. You got me wrong in my explanation of how he teaches us. He is a physics teacher and spares no gruesome detail in explaining what sound is and what effects it(hall, Mic, and room equalization) we do talk about what could cause a problem like the hiss of a bad cable or a bad Mic or the Tin Can syndrome as we call it. I just did not feel the need to go into the technical aspects of it but it is true you can never finish learning.

I am open for discussion on this subject anytime. What is it that you call the tin can syndrome?

[Nikhil Bajaj]

I have a larger problem when a team talks about sending the gearboxes to be professionally machined

I feel that issues such as this aren't a problem. If you really consider it, buying stock parts or having other people machine your parts are simply a matter of economics. The teams simply made a decision that to pay for the cost of professional, precision machining would be worth the time and design effort they would save. Is it unfair? Not at all. If they have machining time donated, that should appear on their BOM. Thus, they take a significant (because machining costs are not small at all) portion of their robot cost budget in order to get the precision that they need/want for the design. Anyone can get stuff machined, (especially since the advent of cool sites like emachineshop.com) and it will roughly cost the same amount on the BOM. Buying stock parts and systems is the same kind of issue.

There are many types of mechanical design--selection design, when you look for pre-made or pre-fabricated parts to accomplish things so you won't have to design your own--is an incredibly important one. To deny that it exists is entirely unrealistic, and a team that buys a pre-made assembly and adapts it to their robot has succeeded in design. In certain circumstances, it may even be a wiser decision in terms of effort. If we had bought pre-made gearboxes last year it would have saved us three weeks of design and hundreds of man-hours and dozens of headaches, and had that manpower been focused instead on our arm and manipulator systems, we could have done better.

The point is that although it means you might do less work to design and manufacture parts, using pre-existing services and products is intelligent and a large facet of modern engineering and design.

Now, this ties into the larger issue. When there are teams that are all students and they build a robot, that's alright, fine. But with good engineering mentors and teamwork, they could be more inspirational. Proper selection design is simple and elegant, and in my mind, inspiring. I'm sure all of us who have been to competitions have been awestruck or at least wow-ed by some use of a product that we've never seen before, for example, Team 71's use of file cards to creep along the carpet, unstoppable in 2002. Sure, that's more creative than most such uses, but the point is that buying and using premade parts and adapting them to robots is a critical part of FIRST and engineering in general.

I was once in a computer lab in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Purdue, and I overheard a conversation in which one student was proposing to make a spacer by ordering a piece of stock and sitting at the lathe for several hours to make it the correctly. Had this guy the experience to know, then he would have just ordered the same part off of McMaster-Carr and would have perhaps had to spend 10 minutes on the lathe. Someone in his group, who I knew, and had done FIRST before, directed the guy to the McMaster-Carr website, and the guy was like, "Ohh..."

For me, at least, those "Ohh..." moments are often the most inspiring in my life. I used to be a student and now I'm a mentor, so I've seen both sides of the coin. I used to feel (when I was a student) that I should be doing a lot more of the work, that the mentors should be doing less. But when you work with engineering mentors, that "Ohh..." thing happens a lot. And you learn that trial and error methods are time-intensive and there are ways to do component design and selection that minimize weight and optimize design while still having the same functions, and that one of the few ways to learn those ways are through an engineering education and background.

And then you realize...
If you hadn't been working ALONGSIDE those engineers...you'd never have that other person to say, "Well, why don't you do this, so that it works?"

And you'd never have been able to say "Ohh..."

[Chaos204]

If you really consider it, buying stock parts or having other people machine your parts are simply a matter of economics. The teams simply made a decision that to pay for the cost of professional, precision machining would be worth the time and design effort they would save. Is it unfair? Not at all. If they have machining time donated, that should appear on their BOM.


There are many types of mechanical design--selection design, when you look for pre-made or pre-fabricated parts to accomplish things so you won't have to design your own--is an incredibly important one. To deny that it exists is entirely unrealistic, and a team that buys a pre-made assembly and adapts it to their robot has succeeded in design. In certain circumstances, it may even be a wiser decision in terms of effort. If we had bought pre-made gearboxes last year it would have saved us three weeks of design and hundreds of man-hours and dozens of headaches, and had that manpower been focused instead on our arm and manipulator systems, we could have done better.

I agree that it is very beneficial to the competition to utilize the skill of professionals to machine parts for the robot. But all the headaches was hopefully well worth it because the students gained valuable first hand experience in the manufacture of such parts. Now they have encountered the inherent problems with each design and when the time comes for them to join the engineering community they will have the benefit of experience rather than going at it cold in the professional world.

If a professional comes to where ever your team works or you take a sort of field trip to the professional to be taught then you are getting the "Ohh..." factor as you so well put.
On the other hand if the design is made by the students with mentors then their design is sent to be created that is good too as long as the students see what makes a working part.

As i said before a desirable relationship must be found where the students and mentors have a chance to voice there opinions on design and on fabrication. So the students learn why their ideas may or may not work.

O ya, The tin can syndrome is a nickname the teacher gave the actors voices during Mic. check one day when they sounded very metallic. (sounded Mic.ed)
we have since adopted it for regular use whenever the voices sound like that. It's kinda a running joke, like when the actor is saying his lines and we modify the lines to make the daunting task of balancing the EQ more light hearted. Like say the line was a preacher during his sermon "And the lord said why..." we would change the line to "And the lord said why... do i sound like i am in a tin can!"
You might need to be there... it was the best example i can think of a the moment, but there are better ones.

[Pat Chen]

[QUOTE=Arefin Bari]Very good thread Andy...

When someone tells me the word "mentor" I think of someone who will be there to teach me, and then watch over my shoulder when I am building cool things. If it is not possible for me to design or machine a part, or code certain section, then the mentor take over and solve the problems. I have seen many teams work like that. The students love it, because they get the best out of the program...............


QUOTE]

What Arefin wrote in quite true.....students will learn a lot if the mentors let the students do the work first...then offer advice or help...... I know this thread is about technical mentors...but what we need to acknowlege is .....without school board personnel supporting the team....nothing happens too.....many times...we hear of a team dissolving because they cannot find a teacher or any school board personnel to mentor the team.....even if they build a robot.....they cannot travel to any competition....to combat this...is to do Dean's homework....spread the word of FIRST..... :) there is a chat scheduled to talk to educators on Tapped In.....believe it or not....not too many of my colleagues are aware of FIRST and what it is all about....I know ...because of my children's involvement....otherwise...I would be clueless too.....we have a thread about the chat.....it will be on 12/6...7-9 PM EST....http://tappedin.org/tappedin/ ......on the K-12 Campus....Robotics (K-12) chat room...you have to register...guests are not allowed on the K-12 Campus.....email me if you have any questions.

[CJO]

I must disagree with many of you. In manyt ways I think what makes some of the FIRST designs really great is that the students do not know enough to know the "right" way to do things. Instead of having been told what years of education can teach, we get to really experiment with things, sure, it may not be economical or efficient, but the time for that is later. Now, students get a chance to just get their hands a bit dirty. That is also why I am against identical designs which get used year after year. To me these are just the same as if a mentor did all of the designing. Even if the designs were originally students', after a couple of years the new stuents are robbed of the experience of seeing their own designs to reality.

In many ways FIRST is about re-inventing the wheel -- or at least re-making it.

[phrontist]

You already "get" the fact that you need to further your education and you already know that you will end up in some sort of technical career when you enter the workplace. You probably score between 700 and 800 on the math portion of your SAT's. You have good work experience and are probably graduating high in your class. Colleges are lining up to recruit you to come study on their campus.

It would be a deceit of omission to let that slide. Sadly, none of the above assertions are true.

I understand your argument Mr. Baker, and I've read quite a bit of what The Denim Clad One has put forth, but I still can't bring myself to embrace that viewpoint totally. There must be a middle-ground here, but I don't know what it is yet.

[Alexander McGee]

It would be a deceit of omission to let that slide. Sadly, none of the above assertions are true.

I understand your argument Mr. Baker, and I've read quite a bit of what The Denim Clad One has put forth, but I still can't bring myself to embrace that viewpoint totally. There must be a middle-ground here, but I don't know what it is yet.

With your ability to string words together so eloquently, the way you have several times in this thread, I would think that you are not giving yourself enough credit. Your posts reflect the intelligence of someone far beyond your years, and yet you claim that you have difficulty grasping this concept.

Let me help explain what you and I didn’t get in High School, and what I now understand about this program. It is one thing to be a student on a team, and an entirely different thing to be a mentor. From the posts you have made in other threads, it is blatantly obvious that you have utilized experience with computers and programming in your FIRST and personal life experiences. Where, may I ask, did this come from?

Whether it was from this program or not, both situations point to the same thing; FIRST works. For some reason or another, you have learned something on your team, or expanded on what you already knew. This not only makes you want to do and know more, it excites the people around you.

Imagine, if you would, being a mentor on a team instead of a student. Now, your priority is to engage your students both mentally and mechanically to get them excited. On my team, this means being fairly hands-off and letting the students design and manufacture everything. Knowledge, however, does not come from nowhere. Someone has to show you how to do something, directly or indirectly.

How did you learn to program? Did you have someone over your shoulder showing you how to write code? Or, did you get a tutorial online or a book from a store? One way or another, you learn by example and demonstration. You can not simply “get” something like programming; there is inherent information that you need to know before you can learn. This is similar to mechanical aspects as well; if you have never learned how to use a screwdriver, you may waste a good amount of time trying to figure out how it works, but having someone over your shoulder to demonstrate and show you how to use it makes things go a lot easier.

Continuing with the screwdriver example, arguably some people will remind me that a fairly intelligent person can figure out how to use one in a certain amount of time. I would insist, however, that this wasted time is not necessary, as the ultimate goal is to teach someone how to use a screwdriver. What does it matter where you learned it from? Be it a book, tutorial, random experimentation, or someone using one alongside you.

However, there are certain things that are next to impossible to learn with experimentation alone. Try learning to use CNC mills or 3ds max without any help files, tutorials, or guidance at all. See how long it takes you to learn how to master them.

Al that being said, there is much disagreement about the role of an engineer on a team. Many people do not see eye-to-eye on this, because some things work for some teams, but would rip others apart. I agree with you, 100% that direct student involvement is vital to inspiration in this program. However, consider for a minute this example:

Imagine a team who has been around for over 10 years in this program, with a group of engineers form a successful corporation who are dedicated to making the team great. This team has been a national champion, a Chairman’s winner, and is arguably one of the best teams around. Now, picture a new student who has joined this team, as a freshman. The mechanics of the team allow for minimal involvement of the students in the design and build process, and even less for an inexperienced freshman. The corporation whom the team belongs to likes seeing winning trophies in their display case, and having their company’s name in the papers. The student goes through the season without ever picking up a screwdriver, but watches the engineers with a hunger to learn. He does not ever get to touch or drive the robot, but goes home and learns about other ways he can grow on this interest. He loves being a part of a team who wins, and loves being able to be proud of the robot’s performance, even if he does not get to work on it. The team wins many awards that season, and the student asks his parents for a VEX kit for his birthday. He learns how to use it over the summer and learns more about design and mechanics that he observed from the engineers the previous season. The next season, he observes more and more, and then decides to pursue this stuff as a career.

I’m going to stop there and explain a little bit. I don’t like that situation at all, not one bit, but it has happened exactly as I painted it. The fact of the matter is that a successful robot can inspire a student just as much as one that he built himself without help. I have seen, from personal experience, students on such teams get more inspired and motivated than some of the most technical students in this program. In my personal opinion, engaging the students technically makes the inspiration process work a bit better for those who may not have any interest in the technical aspects of a team. Nevertheless, teams with and without engineers continue to produce excellent students into the corporate world.

You seek a middle ground, but why does it have to be a war? You may not see this now, but I guarantee you will a few years after you graduate and get a job with a company; it does not matter how much you got to touch the robot, it does not matter who built the robot or designed it or wired it, it does not matter how many awards you won or how many times your robot lost a match. None of this matters as long as you are still inspired.

The fact that you continue to peruse these forums and post shows me that you are inspired. You may not know how it happened, and might disagree with the methods that your team’s mentors used; but it happened nevertheless, and you are now someone’s success story, and have made Mr. Kamen proud. You may not like his viewpoints, and may not like what has happened in your FIRST carrer, but you have defineately been inspired, and that's all Mr. Kamen really wants of you. :)