Re: The Meaning of FIRST
 

I don't believe I'm replying to this thread. I know it goes against my better judgement, but here it goes.

This is an often used quote, but I don't believe it is the best analogy when it comes to FIRST. Here's why (this will probably be long winded: sorry):

We don't need inpiration to eat. If we don't eat, we will die. Everyone is already very inspired to eat, so if you need to fish to eat you already have plenty of inspiration (i.e. avoiding death).

A more likely statement would be: "if you solve and equation for a student, he has one solved equation. If you teach a student to solve equations, then the student can solve equations for a lifetime."

That sounds great, but the schools are already doing that. Unfortunately, the success rate is not good in a lot of cases.

The problem lies in the question that we've all heard from fellow students hundreds of times in our school days: "Why do we have to learn this? when are we ever going to use this crap!?!" The answer to this question is where FIRST comes in.

The issue is that if a student doesn't want to learn something, he/she generally won't learn it very well. People don't want to die of starvation so teaching a hungry person to fish is easy. People that think that imaginary numbers have no use in the real world don't have enough interest to not purge that knowledge right after the exam (if they have enough interest to learn it in the first place). Our standard education system does not have: a) a method of getting the students to want to learn, and b) a method to get them to apply what they've learned to reinforce it.

With all of that being said, these are my goals as a mentor:

Goal 1: Provide some answers to "how are we ever going to use this crap?"

Goal 2: Make students actually WANT to learn about math and science. (i.e. inspire them). If we can do some cool whiz-bang things, then they can see that not only can you use what you learned in school, but you can do some fun things with it.

Goal 3a: Get the students to learn above and beyond what they're learning in school, and apply what they've learned (i.e. get them to do some basic work on the robot).

Goal 3b: Get the students to use what they've learned to do some advanced work on the robot.


Goal 2 is the stated goal of FIRST. If I can't achieve that goal, that is when I feel I've failed as a mentor. Goal 3a and 3b are the icing on the cake.

I'm not always able to get all the way to 3b. Sometimes, I may not be able to get to 3a with all of the students in their first year on the team. It depends a lot on the students, but I try my hardest to get to 3b with every student that I can before he/she leaves the team.

Back to the original intent:

It's kind of like the reason that Dean Kamen founded FIRST: if he works on the world's problems, then he has one person trying to solve the worlds problems. If he creates an army of engineers, then he has an army solving the world's problems. I agree that if we can teach the students something then they have some skill that they can use for life. However, if we can inspire them to want to learn in school, then they will have thousands of skills that they would otherwise purge from their memory the minute the final exam is over.

Re: The Meaning of FIRST
 

This.

Not all teams have any students to program. I tried to sweet-talk the mess out of programming, making it sound like the best thing since sliced bread, yet nobody wanted to step up. We only had roughly 10 students anyway. So I basically programmed the robot that year as a college mentor. Did I want to do it? No. But what should we have done? Have someone out of high school program the robot and make the FRC program worth their time, or just waste six weeks of our lives and thousands of dollars on a hunk of metal that just sits on the field because of some imaginary rule that states mentors can't work on the robot?

But let's assume that they do, in fact, have a programming team of, say, 2 or 3 students. How do you know that those students gave it their all, their 110%, and just couldn't figure out a specific problem? They Googled, CD'ed, did whatever they could on their own to solve the problem. So now they're resorting to the mentor. For all you know, yes, that mentor is going to program part of the robot, but maybe they're going to show the students how they're solving it as they figure it out.

I don't mean to sound rude, but you should get your facts straight when making this argument (which, by the way, has been done way too many times on CD) before making absurd assumptions and statements.

Re: The Meaning of FIRST
 

The point you are trying to get across does not only go for programming. For many teams the mentors are the ones that did FRC themselves and still feel as they are a part of the highschool aged group aspect of the team. Meaning they feel many of the same responsibilities as the kids do, and since they are much more experianced and know what needs to be done they take much of the work on themselves, to make sure it gets done right.

Also not everyone on the team is willing to put the amont of time and effort in as others do, this means that a small group of students and the mentors usually end up picking up the slack.

It is a peeve when you hear that a mentor did so much but, many students put the majority of their time into the build too. Meaning the work is not always evenly shared between team members, so if the mentors left us to build our own robots more work would be on the other students.

It is very much worth it for the students who put their time into it, because they know what they have accomlished and to me the goal of FIRST has been accomplished by the students who try because the goal cannot be accomplished with no effort.

Re: The Meaning of FIRST
 

Oh no...I cannot believe I got another red dot. For being negative???? Gotta love those who post smart remarks and give negative ratings. I said nothing negative at all. Is there a way to find out who posted that last rating? Unbelievable!

Re: The Meaning of FIRST
 

If you click on "user cp" near the top of the page all of your reputations given and received are listed, along with who received/gave them and the associated comments.

Re: The Meaning of FIRST
 

Engineering is a big, big type of fishing to teach. Inspiring kids to study it in college might be more practical.

Re: The Meaning of FIRST
 

I have been three years in FRC and at the beginning I had the same problem with mentors provinding "excesive" help. In my first season our mentors didn't even know what was FIRST about so they only guided us, they didn't help us to build, the only thing they did is that they made an iron (yes, iron) arm to handle the tubes (my first season was in 2011, Logomotion). They made the robot just as we told them. Making an iron arm was just stupid, too much weight.

Then when we arrived at the Alamo regional the first thing we noticed was the Robowranglers (148) robot. We could not understand how an student-made robot was so great. Then we saw a lot of mentors of the team working with the robot and since that was not happening in our team we thought they were cheating. (Of course they were not, the thing is that we didn't know that it is OK to be helped by your mentors).

In that season I felt very inspired towards engineering because it was really challenging to built a robot without much significant help. I wanted to be just like team 148 (I really admire those guys). And our robot that season did horribly, I felt frustrated but the goal was achieved. I was inspired to be an engineer, I started appreciating sciences also.

In my second season, long story short, we recieved too much help from our mentors. Our mentors arrived early to our workshop (while we were in class) to continue working with our robot, when we arrived at our workshop the robot had some serious issues resolved and some team members were a little disappointed about that. However, that was not the end of it, in the competition everyone was very inspired because of our robot did well and we had the chance to appreciate the job that other teams had done . (Again, team 148 and 118)

This is my third season and now I know that mentors working along students have nothing wrong. That way students can learn from their mentors and mentors can learn from their students also. The thing is, you need to know that FIRST is about inspiring students towards engineering and sciences and this can only be done by cooperating between mentors and students. The balance between student and mentor work needs to be found by each team. Each teams needs to know what works for them.

You need to accept that a robot built 100% by students is not going to win against a robot built between students and mentors. Also the experience that an student get from working with its mentor is one of the best things of FIRST, mentors are there for a reason.

Work along with your mentors, you will not regret it. That is the meaning of FIRST and each team should work to find their way to accomplish it. It is all about inspiring people.

Re: The Meaning of FIRST
 

As many other threads on this subject have described, very Very VERY few teams exist on either extreme (all student vs all mentor) and if they do then they won't last long. I think all of us here on CD (and the FIRST community) can agree that the issue is one of "many shades of gray" instead of a black and white one. So why on earth do people attack the other side using arguments that assume a black and white answer?

Use your brains and actually think about what someone means by their statement. "Mentor built" may not mean that mentors are actually building/programming the entire robot. It could be meant that they are designing the whole thing, dictating what is done, heavily influencing its design through suggestion, building the tricky components, doing the majority of the machining, etc. The same for the flip side with "Student built." I know for a fact that my personal definition of "mentor built" does not match many people's definition and it has caused a lot of friction in the past. Think about the possible differences in perspective before you post! It will turn this into less of a trench war and more of a conversation!

This issue is as much an issue of a failure of communication as it is an actual issue. This debate had quite a few flame wars before I was even aware of FIRST, so I choose to suspect that some ancient history is the culprit for this chasm of assumptions between the two sides. None the less why is the argument stuck in the same spot it was when I was a high school freshmen? We should not be arguing the same things, but rather setting community-wide definitions so that future arguments are actually worth something.

Re: The Meaning of FIRST
 

Good luck.

Re: The Meaning of FIRST
 

Just so it's clear - it wasn't me. I kind of liked your comment.

Sorry for my overly long response. I think connor worley made a great one sentence summary of what I tried to say in 3 pages. I need to be more concise. Thanks, Connor.

Re: The Meaning of FIRST
 

Exactly this. It seems to me that the vast majority of the comments in many of these topics are attacking either entirely student-built robots or entirely mentor-built robots, when of course the vast majority of teams fall somewhere in between (and not particularly close to either extreme). It's not surprising that very little ever gets accomplished in these topics when most people are attacking concepts that few teams embody and few people are willing to defend or think is right.
There are legitimate issues about some teams possibly getting too far towards one side or the other, and the effects that may have on the greater FIRST community. It's unfortunate that they get buried under a bunch of strawmen most of the time.

Re: The Meaning of FIRST
 

There are clearly two sides to this argument. As for me personally, I've been in FIRST for two years, and been on two incredibly different teams at very oposite ends of the spectrum. My first FIRST team (why does that never get old?) was a very small team. We didn't have the time or the student base needed to have the kids do everything alone, and we REALLY didn't have the mentor base to be able to teach every student to do everything alone. Our goal was just to get it all done in whatever way we could- even if that meant mentors stepping in a lot more than some teams think they should. It worked though, and because of those limited resources I learned that if you want of know something you need to step up and bother someone until they show you, and once you know you better be able to do it AND teach it to someone else too.
This year I was on a very large first year team. We were blessed with a lot of brilliant and dedicated mentors, a combination I was anticipating to mean that the students did practically nothing. Then we decided to go with a very "hands off" approach that meant that the kids learned a truley incredible amount of skills in a short time, but we could also afford to take the time and take students away from working long enough to explain how every little thing worked before letting the kids do it. Both these approaches have been praised and criticized, along with all the other 2000+ ways teams are run, but in my experience every FRC team values student learning- and values it in a different way than every other FRC team. As long as the students learned SOMETHING, (whether it was programing skills, shop skills, life skills, team work, or just that if you stay at school long enough during build season pizza will arrive) then the goal has ultimately been accomplished.