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Matt_Kaplan1902 26-03-2007 13:59

Re: FRC Collaboration 2007: Respectful Remix
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by M. Krass (Post 605168)
I don't understand how you can cite the supposed degrading quality of robots as justification for your collaboration when you decided upon such action well before ever seeing the work of other teams. The three threads you've linked to as part of this justification have all been created within the last two weeks!

I don't care how, why or if you collaborate with another team as it's none of my business, but I'm not inclined to believe that the overall quality of robots that did not yet exist factored into your decision.

I do not think he meant to point out those specific threads as justification as more to show how it has become more evident this year than others. The simple fact is that the competition in our area has been steadily declining for years for a variety of reasons. Our team had come to the decision that a better course of action would be to try and help stregthen the foundation of the veteran teams rather then trying to start rookies.

I could continue this post with several more paragrahs of information but I do not want this specific thread to veer off of the topic. However I would be more than happy to dicuss questions,concerns, comments, etc. with anyone that may have them through PM, AIM, whatever.

Madison 26-03-2007 14:38

Re: FRC Collaboration 2007: Respectful Remix
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Matt_Kaplan1902 (Post 605206)
I do not think he meant to point out those specific threads as justification as more to show how it has become more evident this year than others. The simple fact is that the competition in our area has been steadily declining for years for a variety of reasons. Our team had come to the decision that a better course of action would be to try and help stregthen the foundation of the veteran teams rather then trying to start rookies.

I could continue this post with several more paragrahs of information but I do not want this specific thread to veer off of the topic. However I would be more than happy to dicuss questions,concerns, comments, etc. with anyone that may have them through PM, AIM, whatever.

Trickle-down robotics, eh? :)

I suppose there's a fundamental difference in how some of us perceive the quality of competitors this season. There is nothing about this year that strikes me as being particularly remarkable, for better or for worse. I don't recall any discussion during 2006 or earlier that reflected any trend toward diminished quality of competition, though, so it remains curious to me that others perceived as much and though enough of it to act.

I suppose, above all else, my concerns have less (or nothing, really) to do with collaboration between teams and all to do with this weird notion that's been floating around that this season has been less competitive or less inspiring than years passed. Collaboration works for some folks and doesn't for others the same way as lots of other things in life, but I think that defining the benefits of collaborating within the context created by veteran FIRST teams and participants that, somehow, the rest of us are doing a poor job of keeping up, is deceptive and a bit arrogant.

Stephen Kowski 26-03-2007 15:49

Re: FRC Collaboration 2007: Respectful Remix
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by M. Krass (Post 605234)
the rest of us

please don't downplay your efforts all year long for arguments sake here, im not exactly sure anyone was referring to you or your team in this discussion.....I'm pretty confident a team with a dedicated mechanical engineering mentor and an what looks like a decent sized budget (judging by your posts and offseason project photos) is not the team type we are discussing

Furthermore I do not see what your or my (first paragraph) discussion is adding to a thread intended for "What worked for you, what didn't work, what can be improved, what's unique to your situation, what difficulties exist in collaboration, what benefits you saw, etc..."

Please stay on topic, I know you are replying, but already I can see that this is starting to become a painful discussion. I don't need a response saying I am just as culpable, I know this.

Madison 26-03-2007 16:37

Re: FRC Collaboration 2007: Respectful Remix
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Stephen Kowski (Post 605300)
please don't downplay your efforts all year long for arguments sake here, im not exactly sure anyone was referring to you or your team in this discussion.....I'm pretty confident a team with a dedicated mechanical engineering mentor and an what looks like a decent sized budget (judging by your posts and offseason project photos) is not the team type we are discussing

Furthermore I do not see what your or my (first paragraph) discussion is adding to a thread intended for "What worked for you, what didn't work, what can be improved, what's unique to your situation, what difficulties exist in collaboration, what benefits you saw, etc..."

Please stay on topic, I know you are replying, but already I can see that this is starting to become a painful discussion. I don't need a response saying I am just as culpable, I know this.

I'd love to read more from folks who've been down this path about the specific things that have happened that have made the collaboration better and more challenging for the teams. I agree that such discussion is far more valuable than anything that tries to justify to others why you've gone down this road.

I'm interested specifically in learning how your manufacturing processes were impacted by working together and if it resulted in reduced, similar or increased burden upon those who do such work for you. My team does all of its manufacturing in our lab, and though we have access to some fantastic equipment, we spend far more time machining parts than we'd like to. I'd love to see more from people who've been involved in collaboration that talks about the potential it has for decreasing costs to teams for parts that are being manufactured by a third party. Our kids learn a lot from those processes, but I think there's more value in teaching them the fundamentals of design rather than how to properly operate a bandsaw.

How do you manage design responsibilities and integration? I'm notorious among my team for being difficult about allowing others to take on responsibility for the design of the robots because I've had several disasterous experiences with poorly managed design integration and find that it's easier to give one person control over the whole thing. I'd love to learn more about effective methods for distributing responsibilities in a way that doesn't leave you trying to put a square peg into a round hole during week five. I can't imagine the sleep I'd lose if I were relying on someone else for, well, anything -- but that's probably a personal problem. :)

I don't think we'll ever collaborate with another team in the same manner as y'all and others have done, but the lessons learned about managing two groups building the same robot still have some value to me. We've considered, essentially, splitting our team in two and entering a pair of cloned robots as a reasonably cost-effective method for providing our kids more opportunities to be involved than we can currently manage. That scenario isn't quite collaboration as most people view it, but many of the technical challenges would be similar.

That said, I'm sorry to read about the disappearance of teams from other regions and that people think that it leads to an overall decrease in quality. The Pacific Northwest has similarly lost a number of teams in past years -- in fact, 488 remains the only team with ties to Seattle's public school system -- but the quality of the teams that remain has been notably better this season than in the past. This season has more new teams than any before, so there might be some expectation that the quality of the competition would suffer, but a rookie team in 2007 is an entirely different beast than a rookie team several years ago. 1902, though only in its second year, has mentors with years of experience behind them -- and that same scenario repeats itself all around the country as FIRST-graduates go off to universities and corporations and start teams of their own. That's a far cry from the few weeks of preparation my very first FIRST team had way back in 1999.

I don't find this discussion particularly painful and I hope that's true of everyone down in the sunshine state. I think there're some interesting forces at play when you get down to discussion the quality of robots, what metrics are used to define such quality and those who're pointing out its deficit this season, however, and I agree that discussion is probably best for elsewhere.

Joel Glidden 26-03-2007 16:58

Re: FRC Collaboration 2007: Respectful Remix
 
I don't think I'm helping to steer this thread back in the direction that the pro-collaborators seem to want to see, but I just have to respond to the notion that manufacturing alliances are going to stop the bleeding, so to speak, in FIRST.

I'm a four year veteran of FIRST (Engineering Mentor 2002 - 2005). I have fallen out of contact with my former team as work has moved me two hours away from them. There was a time when I thought I would start a team in my new location, but I have not taken that step. The single greatest reason I have not founded a new team is that manufacturing alliances for competitive advantage are both allowed and encouraged by FIRST. They are increasing in number every year, and with design re-use, their economies of scale become ever more effective.

If I were to set myself on an even playing field with these mega-teams, I would have to start not one, but two or three teams in an area that will be hard pressed to support even one.

Now I know there's no "C" in F.I.R.S.T. (competition). I know what the "I" stands for. I've found other ways to reach the young'uns. The point is that for me, as an engineering mentor, the answer to the question of "Why FIRST?" was that I thrived on the competition. Right now, the competition side of FIRST is flat out broken.


Now, addressing the topic - What worked for me?

One team building one robot, and if they had the resources, they could build that robot as many times as they wanted. But they had to design and build the entire thing themselves except for those items they purchased off the shelf and accounted for in their BOM and budget.

I'll grant you that letting your team get away with designing and building half (a third?) of a robot twice (three times?) may have kept your team in it for another year. But I'll also tell you that the very same thing has kept my team out.

James1902 28-03-2007 10:01

Re: FRC Collaboration 2007: Respectful Remix
 
On the subject of what worked about my teams collaboration efforts...
1) We definatly have an awesome robot this year. Plus becasue of the collaboration we got the robot to the drive team/programmers in week 5 so we had a full week to critique , drive and program.
2) Seeing how other teams work is an expirence. Having only been in FIRST 3 years it's nice to see things from a different perspective sometimes and knowing what goes on with other teams. Plus you can learn ,and teach, ways to build, organize, program, ect.
3) As a student I learned more of what a profesinal design, build effort is like. Heck when the Saturn 5 rocket was built to go to the moon parts were made all around the country. Last year the farthest you had to comunicate was from the drill press to the chopsaw. Just learning logistics was an eye opener.

Compared to last year this year was, for me, a better experience than last year. I got to meet more people, see the challenges of a "long-distance relationship", and I got an awesome product. Another great FIRST year.
-James Austin


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