Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

PM'd.

I think what Sam is trying to say is that changing every school in America is hard, regardless of the magnitude of whatever effect you want to achieve.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

So it would then follow that your goal is not to make CD more accessible, but to construct an alternative environment that you can control to be a "safe space." Or is this conclusion incorrect?

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

If somebody has been raised in a "safe space" their whole life, they're not going to readily leave. F4 Connect will by no means be a safe space, but we're aiming at making it "safer" than CD while still letting kids get advice from the outside. And as I've said before, problems that need the extra help will come to CD and other external resources.
We're called "Connect" for a reason! :D

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

It may benefit you to pivot direction and focus on the connect part of your idea. You're onto something with the idea that students may be apprehensive about posting here. Why not have a rolodex of mentors you trust to answer patiently and kindly and have close partnerships with to forward technical questions to? Introduce the student to the mentor so they feel more comfortable and let the student ask their question to someone with a wealth of knowledge. I think this would achieve everyone's goal of making students feel comfortable to ask questions they may be worried are "dumb" and ensure they get the best help. You all can field the high school questions since mentors are usually farther removed from that scene.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

We totally can and will do something like that. Ive been able to build up relationship with many of the top mentors In frc and I am sure many of them would be happy to help another person with a question they could better answer.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

Sam et al -

Cool idea! It's certainly something I would have been interested in when I was a student. As with all things, the devil is in the details and the execution.

One piece of advice: start succession planning early. Your goal should be to have a strong enough pipeline built up that the program can still be successful once you graduate.

One question: does F4 have a website? A cursory google search for "F4 FIRST Robotics Competition" brings up some CD and reddit posts, but no website explaining the mission and goals for F4. It would also be interesting to see who is on your board and who your members are.

Again, Good luck!

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

We are working on a website now, as a matter of fact. Thank you.
We believe that the way Board elections work right now are good for succession based on everybody's experience on their own teams, but we'll have to see how it goes in a year or two as people graduate. It's difficult to know exactly how succession planning should go in an organization that has complete turnover every four years, but we'll make it work.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

It seems like there is a bit of a shift here from the beginning of the thread to this point. It started off being:

Emphasis mine.

But now it has changed to:

So, again, it seems like the purpose of Connect has changed a little bit. The second alternative is obviously preferable to the first, but still, it seems like a better idea to direct students with questions to CD rather than Connect, even if only to expose them to a place where they can continuously learn from watching and reading other conversations rather than being limited to knowing the answer to that one question they needed an answer to in the first place.

Relying on inexperienced students only to answer potentially difficult questions could also leave a struggling team worse off than they already were, as well as potentially denying them access to a wealth of other interesting, unrelated knowledge in the future. Who can say they haven't learned something new from keeping up on the newest threads here? I'm reminded of the old saying, "give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and feed him for life." If you show a student a place where they can find answers to almost any FRC-related question, they will be able to get quicker answers in the future rather than waiting hours/days on a response from a student every time their code crashes or a Talon isn't getting power, as well as getting the knowledge of people who actually work in the engineering field. And this isn't only related to CD. It is an obvious fact that the more people you have, the better it will be.

Just my $0.02.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

Thank you.
The intention was always to be able to direct students to mentors in the event that they needed it (after all, 95% of F4 is from CD), but it looks like Sam forgot to include it in his initial post. I trust the people in F4 to recognize when something is out of their scope more than I trust a complete newbie to join CD on their own. Most of the students I know that avoid CD do so by choice, not due to ignorance.
Many times I've encountered students who were too afraid to get mentors on their own team or strangers from other teams to help them. I have a sneaking suspicion that the the type of questions we'll get usually won't need the extra help that CD offers, but like I said: it's definitely on our list. The frequency depends purely on how often we get questions that would be better answered on CD or by an adult.

On the time to respond: I'm reasonably certain we'll be able to get back to any student within a few hours (the benefit of having people from different time zones in on this), but we won't know until we try.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

As Asid said we are actively working on how to prevent F4 from well crumbling after I leave. There are also plenty of other very important members that will be graduating in 2017.

To start I will actually be staying in the chat for a bit after I graduate. If we do not have anyone who can produce the show technically I will also assist with that but the idea is over next summer to transition someone else to doing everything I do.

We are currently actively working on a website. It should be done sometime in the coming weeks.

As for the board members the list is public here it is
Dan Howanetz from Team 708 - Hatters Robotics
Dikshant Sharma from Team 226 - The Hammerheads
Grace Rosenvall from Team 2122 - Team Tators
Nick Krichevsky from Team 5202 - NewRo Bots
and Smiti Shah from Team 2869 - The Regal Eagles

I am also on the board.

We had around 13 people apply for the board position and then voted from there.

The board members are very diverse. 2 of them have actually never been on a show. Although they are both signed up to be on soon.

Thanks for the encouragement. We are constantly working on improving our show which I think is apparent if you take a look at the production quality boost from episode 1 to now.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

It doesn't seem that way.

Also, what is the plan to spread Connect? If you spread it through CD, it would be pointless, as the students who could see it would already be on CD. Alternatively, if FIRST published it as an official resource, what is the advantage of recommending Connect versus recommending CD if you had to decide between them, especially given CD's much larger user base, larger content base, forum discussion, and the knowledge of experienced mentors?

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

This entire thread is why something like this is needed. Students often don't post here in fear of them making thier team look bad, or just getting thier question/post torn apart by a bunch of mentors. Working with mentors and have having mentors act like you don't know anything are two diffrent things.

It would be just a more comfortable platform for students to use. Often a student doesn't want to always ask a mentor for help. Asking other peers for help is often more rewarding because you can find an answer together.l instead of being told the answer, or told off for asking. Personality I feel asking mentor is often the easy way out of a problem. If you never make a mistake your never going to learn.

CD is helpful when coming to more complex issues where adult input is needed. But often times students prefer to collaborate with thier own peers.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

That comment was about F4 as a whole. F4 will remain students-only (that's the point :)). F4 Connect may direct students to other organizations or people.

Apart from spreading this between our own teams and teams that we know, we're not yet sure how to best advertise. I know students that lurk on CD but don't post, and I know people who do neither on CD but are involved in FIRST. Fortunately, because we are a widespread organization, a grassroots movement can work to some extent for spreading this just through word of mouth. We're still trying to find ways to spread this outside of that, if you have any suggestions.

Why does it have to be a choice between CD or F4 Connect? The two are different organizations that have different characteristics. That would be like recommending only FRC instead of adding FLL and FTC to somebody looking to get into FIRST.
To be fair, with CD's "larger user base, larger content base, forum discussion, and the knowledge of experienced mentors" also comes with drawbacks. ;)


I'll remind people to please provide suggestions for how we can improve the program. The critical replies are beginning to restate the same things over and over again. Rest assured, we are taking everybody's opinions into account.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

To Sam, and the rest of the members of F4 -

Firstly, I’d like to start off by saying that the only reason I felt the need to post this was on account of the fact that you all seem to be scared of mentors and believe that they are some type of overbearing force that you need to revolt against. Thus, maybe as a student (at least, my last 2 days as a student), I’ll have a different impact on you all.

To start off, those who know me both online and in real life, know that I’m someone who can get quite defensive about the decisions I make, and get even more heated about certain topics I’m very passionate about. FIRST robotics, women’s rights, my friends and my family are all topics that I’ll get super intense about and feel the need to comment on.

One more thing I can add to the list of things I’m really passionate about is my love and respect for my mentors. My mentors are people that have put countless hours into me as an engineer as well as a person. They’re people that I constantly go to about anything in life, and whose opinions and insights are priceless to me. The idea of cutting them out of the way that I learn and grow is confounding to me, and it’s heartbreaking to think that other students would want to do that, and I think that is what F4 Connect will. This “new way to get help” as you call it will only cause a divide between students and mentors.

Another issue I see with F4 Connect is that while anonymity can be a good thing, it can also lead to a host of issues. Anonymity can lead to people saying whatever they want with no repercussions, and while you may think that red dots on Chief are “normal,” they’re a good way to keep people thinking twice about what they say and post.

The last biggest issue I see with F4 Connect is a point that Corsetto already brought up. While I’m all for students learning from other teams, I want to know which teams they’re learning from. I want them to be reaching out to the best of teams, and asking them for advice and for help with technical issues. If a freshman were to come to me with an idea the day after kickoff and tell me they saw it on one of 1114’s old robots, or 1678’s, I would happily look it up and be excited to see something awesome, and something I can learn from. But if they were to tell me they got it off of F4 Connect, knowing that the people on the site are made up of a very small sample size of students that have less than 4 years of experience, I would be quite a bit more skeptical.

Look back to when FIRST announced #2Champs. The entire community responded to the announcement, and rather than taking our input, they simply defended their decision and stubbornly have insisted that they are right ever since. Please try to take that into consideration before you defend yourself rather than listening to some of the valuable input that experienced veterans are offering you.

-Alyssa

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

Many people have put it well. Simply, I trust my mentors. If i feel they are wrong in something, than I will explain to them why, and If they feel that I am wrong they will patiently explain to me why I am wrong until I get it, and if they realize that they are wrong... than they will say "my bad" and maybe even give me a pat on the back. And regarding the whole oh some mentors are bad and we shouldn't have to deal with them... all I can say is too bad. The mentors are part of the team. Their decision impact the team, just like yours do. If you can't stand the mentors, and you feel like there is nothing you can do to fix the situation, than leave, find another team. But I think that solution is simply not necessary in 99.99999 percent of scenarios.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

Easier said then done my friend but that's aside from the point.

This service has nothing against mentors especially our own. Some of us however, in the online community its hard to have a voice which is why F4 was created. Connect is a service that really could be mentor run or student run it does not make that much of a difference. The only reason it is only for students is because F4 is all students. Its what sets us apart from the other shows in the FRC community and as we branch out we would like to stick to it.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

Which is what makes it potentially dangerous. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing about a fellow student having their voice "heard", but that is the point of the weekly live stream (which I genuinely enjoy watching BTW, thanks for doing that). But giving direct advice student to student opens many many potential dangerous outcomes.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

Getting advice from all students and only students doesn't quite make sense; mentors are mentors for a reason. If I were taking, say, a chemistry class, if I wanted the best information, I'd ask the person whose trade it is to be able to give me that info: my teacher. It's the same thing with mentors.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

MAKE your voice heard.

MAKE your voice a voice that people want to hear.

MAKE yourself a well-informed and knowledgeable person in the community that can actively contribute To discussion.

It's something students like yourself have done before, it's what I had to do, and it's what my peers had to do too.

Chief Delphi has been around for almost as long as you've been alive, and since that time, people have been developing their voice on the board. It takes time, and it won't just happen over the course of a season or two. If you work on HOW you post to the boards, and making sure posts are full of relevant content, and contribute to the thread, you will develop a voice. If you blindly post and quickly realize you have thousands of posts to the forums, many of which are things that likely could have gone unsaid (something I am actually closely quoting you on), a grave difficulty in developing this 'Voice' will come about.

It comes down to Respect.

With Respect, comes a voice in a board like this.

Growing up, and as a student in school and on the robotics team, I was always taught Respect has to be earned.

So yes, it IS hard to have a voice sometimes in the community. Its what happens when there are literally THOUSANDS of people striving for a voice. If you work hard and carefully for that voice, it will come.

One of my favourite movies is Field of Dreams. A modified quote from the movie follows.

"Build respect and the voice will come".

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

First of all thank you for your input and time to share your thoughts on F4 Connect with us. I'm going to start off by emphasizing that F4 was absolutely not founded on the principle of being scared of mentors. F4 is commonly misunderstood. It is not a revolt against mentors - simply a group for students to get their ideas and opinions emphasized (which often aren't).

We are absolutely not discrediting mentors. We all respect our mentors who shape us to be who we are, and the endless dedication they put into each of us and our teams to make us better. In fact, I even told my mentor about F4 and it's idea, as I tell him almost everything going on. He supported the idea and thought it was a good solution.

Your post seems to be railing on the idea that we don't go to our mentor in times of need. While it is heartbreaking, many people look for outside advice, as every mentor has a certain amount of knowledge in different subjects. CD is a great place for people to post these questions, however as some previously mentioned, it can seem a bit overwhelming at times. The point of F4 Connect is not to create a divide between students and mentors, rather help students that wouldn't normally post on CD, and even possibly (as previously mentioned by Asid61 connect them with other professionals we think could answer the question better). We aren't looking to replace mentors with ourselves - simply offer some help/advice students would otherwise be intimidated to post directly.

As for the anonymity point - I agree. But we will ignore any troll type questions, and if it's serious enough, report it. However it is important to ensure some trust in the community. If you assume everyone is going to use it in a bad way, how will you address those people that use it for genuine purpose.

On the point about experienced teams. I agree to an extent. There are teams with certain success, and you want help from them. Let's not forget we have many qualified people on F4 Connect as well and just because they haven't had a certain level of success, I don't think it's a fair assessment to not consider their opinion. In addition, while technical questions is an option - we oriented it more towards rookies that need simple technical help. All other needs we think would be better answered we will direct elsewhere - or be frank with the person who submits the question and say they should probably ask someone more experienced.

I don't completely understand your last point about 2Champs. They are defending their decision because based on the knowledge/facts they have they realize it may be a better option. As emotionally straining as it might be, it still may be the better option, objectively (but this is opening a whole new can of worms).

We simply saw a problem that many of us faced and produced our solution to it. Whether it is the best solution or worst, without trying it out we don't know. If you don't think it will work then I think it's best to just not use it. I don't think trying to stop the service, with all the hard work put into it, before it even starts, helps anyone.

I would say over the course of this thread, we have gained some insight and made a couple changes as to how this will be run. We appreciate all the posts that help us improve. It is great to know that you were passionate enough to post on this topic, and I hope I was able to clarify some points about F4 Connect.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

I have to disagree. While I have been in situations before (very few regarding my team) where I wish that I was taken more seriously, 90+ percent of the time what I say matters. Its like BKAHL said. You have to MAKE your voice heard by earning respect and proving yourself. By saying that the only way to get students voices emphasized is by creating a group where there are only students, is like (in a extreme way) saying that the only way to end world hunger, is to kill everyone in the world (again, I know this example is much more extreme, just the first thing that came to mind).

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

I know this isn't really related to the current topic, but I was just curious; what is the origin of the name "F4"? I hadn't seen the backstory anywhere and couldn't find anything upon a quick CD search.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

As said by SPERKOWSKY (Samuel) in this video: LINK It is what you want it to be :P :D

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

To be honest. I struggled to come up with a name. I was thinking of names and some how F4 came into my head. We have tried to make something up but failed. So F4 has no meaning.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

I think everyone is taking this too seriously.

While I disagree with the sentiment behind the site, it's a little odd so many of you feel so strongly about it.

Let them be, whichever kid wants to use it will use it.

I still think they should reach out to mentors on CD, email, facebook, fax, AIM, or what have you. If you're a student and you're too scared or shy to do this - suck it up and just do it; learn how to contact people who you look up to. This is a life skill. I did it all the time when I started out.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

I agree that example is extreme - and I don't know how it would even apply. By having a group of students giving out their opinion and making it its own entity, we can attract attention to it, therefore increasing the seriousness of students views. In your example you simply get rid of the problem - the point here is (like I said before) not to get rid of mentors or their ideas/opinions - simply to attract some attention to student views. Also we never said "the only way to get students voices emphasized is by creating a group where there are only students." We are simply offering one solution. Use it or not, it's your call. Either way this doesn't belong here and should probably go on one of the threads about the founding of F4 since it has a lot to do with the principles of its foundation - not connect.

Also, I'm happy to hear that what you say matters 90% of the time. This isn't the case in some scenarios (many of the founders of F4 Connect agreed). Even if we could help one person I would consider F4 Connect a success in my head.

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

That's true, and like I said before I understand why connect is being done, I just don't like the potential bad outcomes.

Don't get me wrong, I love what you guys are doing, and taking the time and effort to do something for the community, its truly amazing, and I hope at some point in the future I might be able to help. For now, I can only warn against possible bad outcomes where students get bad advice from other students. :)

Re: F4 - Connect (The new way to get help)
 

Thank you - and you (as others) have valid points in warning against it. We are currently working to incorporate some of these ideas and fixing probable bad outcomes. I agree it's not perfect but it's in its first draft. I'm sure with some time it will be better and more refined.