Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

REALLY LONG POST ALERT

Both have value.

Failure can be a powerful tool in areas that are less consequential to how well the team will do at competition- offseason projects, learning skills (like CAD, or how to scout a match correctly), that sort of thing. a failed season teaches a team something different- it (hopefully) catalyses change, allowing the team to fix whatever the failure was (over-extension, not listening to each other, not enough driving practice), fixing it for the next year.

Success is a good tool on the large scale- building a working robot that does what you wanted it to, winning a regional, being ranked higher than the previous year. A successful season has the danger of making a team complacent to keep running the team how it has been run, ignoring the skill of the students (either letting mentors control too much in an area which has a strong set of students- ex. being having the mentors decide most of the strategy, while leaving it up to the kids to design the robot, when the students are, as a whole more strategic minded and have trouble coming up with design ideas- or vice-versa, keeping a hands-off approach when the students need guidance). However, a team can also build off of success by realizing that they still failed during the year. Identifying those failures can help them become even more successful.

now, figuring out how involved the mentors should be to ensure competitive success while allowing for smaller, educational failures is a much harder question, because there are definitely multiple right answers, and many of them are dependent on a specific team in that specific year.

2046 has had some very successful years as well as some years that were not so good, even if we won things. In the 4 years that I was on that team, I experienced both, and feel that the successful years differed from the unsuccessful years on two points. the first was creating a successful design for the game challenge (duh). the other was being able to learn from our earlier events (first regional, every district event) and from build season, allowing us to build on our successes and identify where we failed. mentor involvement has been an issue for the team (we re-though how involved mentors should be after our flop of a season in 2013), but we were successful when we had a lot of mentor involvement, and when we had very little. I have 2 examples of such years, which were probably our two most successful, and definitely had our two best looking robots.

In 2012, my team had an extremely intelligent group, many of them more experienced seniors. however, they still worked heavily with mentors in order to complete an ambitions robot design, one that was ranked extremely high in the world (I think our OPR was in the top 80 of the world, but that was 4 years ago and I was a Freshman, so I could be blatantly wrong), and was a generally pretty OP robot. That's not to say that there weren't failures that year; the robot went into the bag not nearly complete, partially because of how long it took to make everything, but also because people messed up sometimes, and had to learn from those mistakes. that means that our first event exposed some more flaws in our design, making us realize we needed an improved intake and a hooded shooter. all of these were smaller failures, though, and learning from them lead us to even greater successes in later events, including our second regional win. Our main failure was our electronics and pneumatics, which were generally a mess. At CMP, our pneumatics developed multiple tiny leaks in the Quarterfinals; the drive team could not find them, and we ran our second match without the ability to put down our multi-tool (& we were therefore unable to use our turret).

In 2015, there was really not that much mentor involvement, yet we powder coated for the first time- a student set up the connection with a powder coating group, got their sponsorship, and then created a place in our shop to powder coat (it kinda looks like a meth lab if you're just walking by :rolleyes:). our robot design was though up of largely by students- most prototyping groups were student-lead, and it was designed, fabricated and programmed pretty much entirely by students. it worked pretty well at our first event (well, after we slowed the lift down), getting us to finals. It still had some major flaws; we were never able to fix all of them due to weight and availability of workers, but we added a top claw, canburglar, and improved our intake over the course of the season. despite not being picked at DCMP, we were at CMP, and ended up being finalists as a 22nd pick robot (we filled the perfect niche- our allies were both feeder station, and couldn't upright containers. we were a landfill robot that could). Our main failures were attempting versatility (being able to do landfill & feeder) in a game that rewarded consistency, and not using a can claw on a coaster.

Both of these years taught valuable lessons (well 2015 did to me personally, I can't say for the team yet). our success showed us ways to continue to be competitive, and our failure created improvements that were implementable over the long term.

Once you get into things mentors do for a team other than teach us skills, such as leadership, creating strategy, etc, it gets murkier; how do you let a student learn from failure as a leader, when that failure could cost your team any chance at success later in the year? I really dont think there's a right answer to this question, because in this area, both the mentors and the students are learning, and should therefore work collaboratively. IMO, there is one thing that every mentor should want: the students to be able to work without their assistance (if FRC is training most of us to be future engineers, we'll eventually need to work independently anyway): it is a mentor's job to teach us how to mill, how to use CAD, how to lead; if we've learned that, then they can take a step back, and maybe even be able to see their families during build season :ahh:


TL;DR: I have personally experienced this:
is more powerful than this:
although both give valuable lessons.


That took me over an hour of writing and re-writing... ya'll're making me think :P
I'm not going into STEM. the skills I learned here are still important (I wont go into detail here, it's not the thread's theme and my post is already way too long)

Re: Value in Failure vs. Value in Success
 

Emphasis mine. These two stood out to me. If I have a student that has some crazy, insane idea or otherwise has objections- I don't want to let that derail the team and our process, but I also don't want to tell them "no that's a dumb idea", because that doesn't help anyone either. I want to run through the analysis with them- let them prove to themselves what the "right" answer is, and point to objective metrics of why thing A is being done.
I think lessons in humility can be taught in ways that impact the overall team less. Smaller exercises in failure rather than large ones. A failed prototype followed by an engineering analysis of that failure might do it, or an detailed analysis of the idea in question compared to other ones. I would hesitate as much as possible from letting other students down to teach one student, but that's a difficult call to make, especially with different personalities involved.

This +1000