Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

Hello All,

I am writing not only to congratulate everyone at the Great Lakes Regional over last weekend, but also to say how unhappy I was to see how much work on so many robots was actually done by engineers. I know that FIRST is For The Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, but you can Inspire students without showing them how to do everything perfectly. The thing that I saw at GLR was The big 3 automakers proving themselves. I feel that they already have a competition for their engineers to prove themselves its called the autoshow. Our team feels that to truly Inspire the students they should prove themselves which I think that we do every year. The teams robot was 95% Designed, Engineered , and Built by the students. Our engineer and mentors are there simply to provide guidance where it is needed, to make sure that no one loses too much blood while working on the robot. I pat those on the back who did well at the competition and hope that others will let me know your feelings on the matter.

Thank-You,
David Lamp
Team 1254
3rd Year
College Mentor

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

It is all a matter of philosophy. There are no absolute right or wrong answers. Every team will do as they please and no one will (or I would hope that no one will) stop them. Do your best to perfect your own team to your liking. Let other teams worry about their own ideologies while you worry about yours.

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

Thank You sanddrag,

I absolutely agree the way that your team approaches the competition is your own perogative and I am in no way trying to change it I am just expressing my feelings.

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

These discussions always become the most heated. I'm positive that if you searched the forums you would find multiple threads discussing, almost to the point of argument, the same situation. Any mods may want to keep and eye on this just in case.

JT
229

Some helpful links:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...mentor+bu ilt
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...mentor+bu ilt
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...mentor+bu ilt
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...mentor+bu ilt

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

My team, team #1888 is a rookie team and over 95% of the work (design, build, everything) are done by students. Our robot may not be the best but we are all proud of what we have created, everyone put in a lot of effort and gave their best.

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

Team 862 is almost entirely student designed and built and 100% student programmed, we fit into the student built philosophy. We have accepted that there teams out there where the mentors do more of the work and that they won't change and they shouldn't have to, each teams has a plan on how to accomplish the mission of FIRST. Our Hacksaw & Drill method helps to increase student involvement because anyone can use them with very little learning time (unlike most of the larger machining tools).

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

I like to think FIRST is about inspiration but also about showing students how things are really done. Sometimes letting them have free reign with everything doesn't accomplish this task. I don't nesc. take the stand that it should be 100% Professionally Engineered, but I definitely respect teams who do because they have a great bot each year and students can learn as much from that as they can from doing something on their own.

One common misconception however is that student bots can't compete with professional bots. This is simply not the case, FIRST always makes the goal accomplish able by even the least fortunate of teams. If you can perform your primary function well and have a solid drive train you will always be competitive. My team 1902 was completely designed and built by students ( that includes 3 college mentors ) and we were finalist at the super competitive UCF regional.

FIRST is very unique, but not 100% fair, It was never intended to be. Its intended to inspire, and whatever your team sets up obviously works to inspire your students. We built our robot in my garage and our students were just as inspired as 233 who builds it in the NASA Prototype labs. You cant even compare the two robots mechanically but functionally we could remain competitive. But at the same time I can show my students 233's robot and say look at this machine and how they built it, and they can learn from it.

Unfortunately this competition will never have a completely level playing field, it wouldn't be a competition if it did. However if inspiring students and the community is still the goal, then which ever way your team accomplishes it great for them. If teams lose site of this goal, then maybe there is where the problems begin.

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

Who cares if it's designed by engineers, as long as the kids learn something from it? I don't!

On my team, it's about 50-50 this year, with students designing the shooter and loader to engineer specs, while the frame and pickup were mostly engineer, and the hopper was split evenly. That's just our mix, and it will be different next year in all likelihood.

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

On our team the work done by students is about 95%. I really think most of the work should be done by the high school students since this is a competition for them.

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

Yada yada. Basically, this has been run into the ground on here. Even if everyone adhered to your approach of mentors playing rah-rah and the students doing "most" of the work, you still have the case of some schools having very heavily invested in vocational programs and have state of the art machine tools available with students capable of running them. Just listen to some in today's posts talking about CNC mills and laser cutters. My team has no such tools, in fact this high school has gutted their vocational programs and currently offers none, but they do have a capable engineer, if I do say so, helping them. So where do you draw the line?

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

I'd say you draw the line at the point that there is no student that could do what the engineer could doing. Maybe teach the student how to do <blah>, but then the engineer does <blah> for time or quality reasons. If the engineer simply says "and then I'm going to do this!" and the student really has no idea what he is going to do or why, then you haven't inspired anything. All you've got is a bunch of engineers building a robot with a couple HS students watching. I'm fine with engineers building stuff when time is tight or quality needs are paramount (and a learning student might screw it up a few times), but it they're doing stuff that students absolutely cannot do, it seems to defeat the purpose of learning things while building your robot. When I mentor programming, I try to make sure that the students do all the work unless we're on a close deadline to get a feature working. It's a high school competition, not a "hey engineers! find a bunch of high schoolers to enter for you so you and your coworkers can build a robot" competition.

At the very least, the students should be PRESENT when the robot is being worked on so they might pick something up. I've seen way too many teams where the students are off in the stands while their team of professional engineers fix/upgrade their robot in the pits.

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

Every team takes a different line on this and ours is that the mentors want to have the students do as much of the robot as they can. Over the course of January 2006, I learnt how to use certain types of saw and how to weld, plus gained a lot of experience with files, despite the fact my role is actually as the scrutineer on the team.

The Mentors will guide us but they will want us to come up with the ideas, feed in their own on occassion for us to consider, and have us do as much of the build as we can, with them teaching us how to do things if we've never done them before. Students also do all the programming too.

I would hope other teams use a similar philosophy rather than have the mentors do all the work. I can personally say about parts of the robot; "I suggested that" or "I welded that" or "I cut that" as can a large part of the rest of our team.

As for tools, we use a mentors garage. You can see that on the FIRSTwiki as on the page for Eric there is a picture of the robot outside the garage, the door still open. We are not the most high-tech team by a long way, part of this years robot will prove that, but we Brits here at Systemetric do put in a good showing most years at NYC.

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

Was it just me or did you all think FIRST tried to narrow the playing field with the 5' height rule? I personally think that they did; this takes away any major leverage that teams (who have ambiguous resources) have with creating arms and whatnot. I like this idea, it gives each and every team the ability to compete fairly without one team being restricted as another is unrestricted. As for mentors/adults/enginners who build robots....I have no comment.

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

I think that engineers doing the work is wrong. You should do the work yourself. I have heard of teams that engineers built most of the robot for them, I seriously dought they gained as much as a team that built every thing by themselves

Re: Percentage of Work Done by Students.
 

It also depends upon the dynamics f the students on your team, if they can build the robot themselves with a little guidance from mentors then they should do that. If the team doesn't have amny students with mechanical and electrical know-how then it is better if the mentors get more involved in teaching the students what to do and what would be the best way to do it.

When it comes to the actually building of the robot i beleive that the mentors should take a "hands-off" approach as much as possible and allow the students to learn through experience, but if there are time/capability reasons then the mentor/engineer should take on the building task.