Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

I have been taught and have taught students I've worked with to say, "I did not work on X, but let me grab so-and-so who knows more about this topic." There is no point floundering if someone with more knowledge is in the pit.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

Sometimes it's not avoidable. We had at least one set of judges specifically seek out students who were less knowledgeable about our business plan in order to determine how much the general team knew about the "business side." I guess they were impressed enough to still give us the Entrepreneurship Award.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

Walking the line between "mentor built" and "mentor enabled" can be a fine one, especially for teams that are deficient in certain student skillsets. "Mentor built" often means different things to different people.

It can be a tough call when you have, for instance, advanced students on your mechanical and electrical team but only basic skilled students on your programming team. Do you tell the mechanical and electrical teams they can't build certain things because the programmers won't be able to support it? If you do allow mechanical and electrical to build to their potential, how much and what kind of support as a mentor do you provide to the overwhelmed programmers? How do you balance success to encourage pursuit of STEM with student participation? It's not easy. The answers will be a little different for each team in any given year.

Getting back to judges, another worry I have is once in a while a judge will mistake one of our students as a mentor. This usually happens to taller, mature, highly knowledgable seniors. Sometimes I get the feeling that we weren't believed when we correct this misperception.

This is another thing that concerns me. It's impossible to have all students thoroughly cross-trained to the extent that any one of them could equally answer all questions.

I think the best a student can do when a judge approaches you with questions that you don't know the answer is to be honest. Tell them what your role is with the team, offer to find another student who can answer the judge's questions, and ask them if they have any questions that pertain to your role.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

Quite honestly, though, while the amount of mentor involvement is a very important personal debate for teams to have internally, it shouldn't have the slightest bit of relevance to judged awards at all. And what a judge perceives as "student built" or "mentor built" shouldn't matter. If an inspired student can professionally explain a quality mechanism within the criteria of an award, they should be eligible for the tech award. If a team of students manages to inspire not only themselves but the community at large through promoting STEM awareness, then they should be eligible for EI. And no student should have to convince any judge that they are the sole entity who built a quality, professional looking mechanism in order for the team to deserve recognition for it.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

I suppose it does give teams more options on intakes, though the success of mechanisms operating under the bumper would be a question for me. I'm more specifically referring to the numerous situations where teams entered another team's frame perimeter and caused damage or where robots were flipped over and all the situations where these either lead to G24s appropriately, didn't lead to G24s, or lead to G24s and shouldn't have.

For a long time we've recognized in a pushing match, all things but bumper height conserved, the team with lower bumpers wins. Unfortunately, this year the possible height mismatch between one team's bumpers and another was so large and in conjunction with drive systems meant to climb things that many robots ended up on top of other robots. In this situation damage or tipping was inevitable and ultimately lead to numerous red cards over the course of the season. A simple change in constraints could have eliminated the single largest source of drama this season.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

If 971 is a mentor built robot, then 1678's robot was built by 971's mentors! :yikes: More seriously, we know how much guidance the Schuh's provide to us and other teams. Yes, Mike always has on knee pads, but they are educators first.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

Respectfully, I think it's a bit too simplistic to proclaim this as an absolute. Student involvement is important. Let's consider an extreme case: if a team showed up to competition that consisted of a handful of students who drove the robot, with literally everything else handled by the mentors, do you think that ought to have "not the slightest bit of relevance" to judged awards at all? There's a reason that the judges talk to students, not to mentors.

Now, I don't mean to imply that such a case is representative of any actual teams - but I think it illustrates, as a principle, why we can't just discard the notion that student involvement is important to whether or not a team deserves an award. I obviously can't speak to the questions that the judges you observed were actually asking, or to whether or not their judgment in the matter was reasonable - but I don't think the concept itself is necessarily wrong. It's all a matter of extent.

Now here, I agree entirely. But if a student is able to professionally explain a mechanism (both in terms of operation and manufacture), what reason would the judges have to believe that the mentors did all the work?

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

It's not in the criteria for the awards. It's not relevant. When judges go off criteria it's always a problem because then teams don't know what they are being judged on... it's a mess.


And the reason is "because it looks too professional to be done by students"

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

IMO the main idea behind FIRST is for the mentors and students to work together to produce a machine that the students could never have produced on their own.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

That is why I followed with an inspired student explaining the mechanism in detail, which is basically the criteria for the award. If a student understands and can explain it, who cares who built it? (Though this is an academic debate mostly; it's not like my team's robots have no student involvement)

They wouldn't, which is why technical judging went off without a hitch for us. The only reason they would have this suspicion is if they sent culture judges to your pit asking them 18 different "gotcha questions", then jumped on your kids for saying a sponsor EDMed a single part of the robot. The witch hunt has to stop. It's harassment, and it's casting broad judgments on entire teams based on preconceived notions.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

I don't think we can rightly expect the one or two-sentence award descriptions to be exhaustive lists of all necessary-and-sufficient criteria for award eligibility.

That the awards are judged by human judges who interview teams on the spot in the pits is more or less a guarantee that awards will be determined by a huge number of factors that are not explicitly in the descriptions. Are some of these undesirable? Of course, we humans are highly imperfect creatures - like it or not, teams are probably judged, to some extent, on whether they were interviewed before or after lunch.

However, I'd contend that along with the bad comes a fair bit of good. If a judge sees members of a certain team behaving ungraciously, that judge is probably going to be less-likely to give that team an award. I think this is probably a good thing, even though plenty of the awards specify nothing about standards of team behavior.

I still think that's a bit more strongly than I'd put it. I do think that student involvement in the design and manufacture process counts for something - personally, the vast majority of the value I got from FIRST was not technical knowledge of robot parts but the realities of working on a difficult challenge under a deadline with limited resources, having to learn to troubleshoot, to figure out what you need to know, what you don't know, and fill in the gaps.

That kind of meta-learning is something that I honestly don't think students can get just by watching, and so I do feel that FIRST has a strong reason to incentivize teams to actively involve the students.

If that's the nature of the judging in question, then yeah, that sounds pretty out-of-line.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

While I agree that it wouldn't be remotely feasible, it is reasonable to believe that technical awards are based solely on the technical, rather than whether my students can maneuver through a Q&A without mentioning adult involvement.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

For what it's worth, I think Andrew has been in a blue shirt at more events than I have been to events in any capacity. Opinions on award criteria availability can be discussed in this thread (and probably should) but Andrew has to train judges on criteria so I'm sure he knows a fair bit of it.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

Lol, I'm not THAT old.


No, Oblarg raises a good point - the criteria are relatively open and by design allow interpretation. But, it has been my experience that the best way to settle a disagreement over who gets awards [1] is to work section by section through the award criteria. It provides a common framework for discussion. Does student involvement factor in? We are human, if a student just seems overly enthusiastic and knowledgeable or even just incredibly personable, that's a distinct advantage.

Really what I was getting at is that judges should absolutely NOT be grilling students to find if the mentors or the students did the work. The award criteria includes that students must be able to describe the stuff [2]. So, if you can't describe it, you don't get an award. Who cares who did it from the award criteria perspective. NOW if a student is more involved they are likely going to be both more informed and more passionate.




[1] OMG SPOILERS judges want to give awards to other teams! This actually isn't about judging in FRC, more a decent conflict resolution skill I suggest folks pick up.

[2] Ok, I think if you read close, it says "team representative" which can TECHNICALLY include mentors.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

I colored mine in with a black sharpie.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

Aluminum gears for gearboxes is not the best place to save weight.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

For higher load applications (cough drive), I have learned to prefer steel. After seeing how many teams lost teeth on alum gears glad we did steel...

To save weight we do pocket out the gears (Carbide > 4140) on a CNC mill with a fixture.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

Yeah!
Remove the big moving pictures they make me motion sick!
Do a better job of organizing the content.
Use navigation terms that specifically indicate what is contained within.
Contact me if you need help, I'm a User Interface Designer.

Dave
DBDesign@hotmail.com

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

For that matter, a machine that mentors couldn't produce on their own, either. Contributions matter on both sides.

Re: Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative
 

for website suggestions or comments, see this post

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...t=inspire+blog