Re: GP? I think not.
 

I never said anything of the sort, I never got offended, I hardly even consider this an argument rather than a discussion.

Re: GP? I think not.
 

oof. This thread is like a car wreck, I don't want to look, but...


Really this is one of those issues that is best worked out as a compromise of the two extremes. The students don't learn much about how projects are engineered in real life if they just build robots on their own. In fact, they don't learn too much of anything. (this part failed! I guess it just wasn't strong enough...) You need the mentors there to tell how things work, and why they work that way! It's difficult to learn from just experience when the knowledge you are trying to absorb is so incredibly vast.

On the other side of things, having mentors build the whole robot without keeping the kids in the loop doesn't teach anything either. I doubt there are any teams that actually take this route, but obviously it doesn't do much inspiring if the kids don't get to play.

You need a mix of these extremes, though how you mix them depends on the team. I'm a fan of the 'kids get ideas, mentors suggest design philosophies, kids implement them, kids get design reviewed/criticized, repeat' strategy. This year has run incredibly smoothly for our team. We get ideas, the mentors advise, the kids get building, and the process repeats. I don't think we could have had a better build season. It actually ran so well that I don't think a mentor ever had to even touch the robot in the pits during the competitions; the students had it all under control!

That's coming from team 1726's one and only mechanical mentor!

Re: GP? I think not.
 

AMEN to that my bed is also calling me...

Goodnight TO ALL

Re: GP? I think not.
 

Bed time?
I just got home from work!
No more issues now with our arm shaft.
Ready for Atlanta.

I guess the best solution is to agree to disagree. :P

Re: GP? I think not.
 

I agree with the bed time. I should really be thinking about doing that right now...

I also think that we will need to agree to disagree. The best way to get a balanced opinion is to try both methods. I don't think that'll happen for a while.

Re: GP? I think not.
 

I know I will be analyzed and called-on for this post but I am going to post it anyway. Instead of arguing any points, I will simply provide my experience on team 25 where mentors are involved in running the team. I do understand your point about mentors taking too much control on some teams and not letting the students work. I have seen it happen and every team has their issues. However, it is part of the challenge to overcome such obstacles and learn to find a balance. Not everyone will be happy but someone has to be the bigger person and step down or up as needed.

Our high school does not have a metal workshop or any machining capabilities. We have tried to find ways to get machinery but it has been unsuccessful as of yet. Therefore, we worked hard to find a sponsor long time ago and attract other tradesmen into our team. We actually had to work to get these people interested and it was no free lunch. At our sponsors place, the students are not allowed to touch any machinery due to liability issues. Therefore, all the machining is done by the tradesmen who take their precious and valuable time usually outside of their normal working day. This is not particularly fun for them and if the students could do it without them, I am sure they would gladly let them. They also have a family and other things to take care off.

When I was a student, there were times I was at the shop and there was nothing for me to do except observe the tradesmen cut parts or weld something. At this moment, I never felt as if I was being deprived of any important experience. If anything, I was inspired and delighted to work with them. The important thing to me was not working on the robot (to an extent). Being around people with a strong engineering background provides many other benefits. By talking to them, I learned about the reasons why they did certain things and how they did it. They would also teach me why they aspire to certain qualities. For example, the wiring on our robot is extremely strict. We spend the extra bucks to buy good quality stuff that will never fail on us. You might think that we do this only for competition. However, these tradesmen do the same for every single project of theirs. The important thing here is to learn the fact that they care about doing high quality work and producing a high quality product. If I was on a student only team, I would use whatever was most popular. I am not criticizing or judging any student only teams, but rather I am trying to point out that I learned something about the thought process that involves making a high quality product in the real world. The most important thing I learned being around BMS tradesmen is their thought process behind everything. This is what really matters and this is what really got me to stick to robotics. It is an honor and a privilege to work with these guys. The learning experience is second to none and I would not trade it for being on any other FIRST team in the whole world.

This is not to say that students do not work on the robot. If you ask students of our build crew this year, they will tell you that they can put together our base together in less than 1 hour if the parts are cut. This is because they have done it so many times during the build season that they really do know what they are doing. Is this important to me? No, not the slightest bit. I have no doubt in my mind that if they simply hung around our engineering mentors, they would learn a lot. The BMS tradesmen have always been very particular about providing our students with the best possible experience. Year after year, they try to give the students work that they would enjoy. When I returned as an alumni, they would not let me do the things I used to enjoy. Instead, they would make sure I teach what I learned to some of the upcoming members.

Our standards to work on the robot are also very high. We try to let as many students as possible get their hands in the grease but if they do not qualify, they are not allowed. Why? Because quality matters and this is a part of the real world training. The students know they have to earn and work their way up. When we build the robot, our objective is to build the very best and the students know this. Therefore, they know they have to work for it. And they very well do.

The guidance provided by our mentors is probably one of the most invaluable thing out there. For example, at the beginning of build season when all the ideas are taken into account, it is up to the tradesmen to decide on the best design. Sometimes, we start of testing multiple things. If we were simply students doing this,, we would probably end up testing too many ideas that would never work. This is a good learning experience but I'd rather hear it from someone with experience that an idea would not work as opposed to have to go through the pain of figuring it out. Our team always likes to remain competitive like many others and some years it is our game and other years it is not.

In short, we work extremely hard with our tradesmen to build a good robot and remain competitive. So why is this important? If you are the team next to us jealous that our robot looks like it was bought out of a catalog, then you are completely mistaken. The students were involved. The awards we win every year and not for the purpose of boasting to the rest of the world about how great we are. Because of these awards, we are able to gain a ton of support from our school, board of education, town, and now the state. We are also able to get the word out to many media sources and corporate sponsors. So why is this good? Because we are established enough to handle all of this. Few short years ago we established RPM (Raider Parent Mentors) who are in charge of NEMO kind of stuff. When are have the success to make an impact, RPM is ready and armed to use the potential force and turn it into kinetic force. I am not going to go in depth on this but to paraphrase, this is how our team gets the word of FIRST out. 10 years ago, no one would have had a clue that a robotics team existed in our town. Today, 2008, a huge portion of the community has heard about us from one source or another and they are mighty proud of it. Winning has only helped our cause and we have used it wisely. I am not saying this to boast but rather to illustrate an important point. Mentors are an important portion of our team. Without them, it would be INCREDIBLY hard to keep this going year after year. This is what Dave was talking about at kickoff. This is a part of changing our culture and mentors are the ones who are making something happen for us. Because of an established mentor group, our team can provide the very best experience for all our students. They are not spoon fed but they are extremely well directed. It only helps us to keep the inspiration flowing year after year after year. More students want to join our team every year and it is getting hard to handle. This would not be possible without mentor intervention.

So back to the original point, I do understand what you are saying about too much mentor intervention. I hope you understand that this is a tiny issue when you look at the big picture. There is always a way to work things out and the important thing is to improve the quality of the experience for the students, mentors and the community. This is about making an impact. This is not about winning an award or two. If your team has not won an award, do things that would make your team happy. Do things that would make your team productive enough to make an impact. Don't worry about the teams who did horrible or did too good or have a catalogued robot every single year. If you want a better robot, work for it. There are tons of resources and even a student run team can use examples from past years. The important question is - is your team willing to work together hard enough to build that robot? The important skill is not building the robot itself because I strongly assure you that it can be learned. There are too many examples in FIRST to prove that. The important issue is the team organization, working together, ethics, morale, impact, etc etc.

With this, I will end. I hope you can think beyond these petty issues and look at the bigger picture. They are way more important things you can do with your time and energy than argue in this thread. If you want a competitive robot, find a way to build one. If you want a sponsor, work hard to find one. There are always answers. It might take some time and things will not always be pleasant. They have never been for us either. However, you will only be happy when you have done your absolute best. Good luck and keep the big picture in mind.

Re: GP? I think not.
 

(Who cares that it's an anonymous account?)

From a personal perspective, I'd rather have a student dominated team than one with a lot of hands-on mentors.

I think students learn more by doing things themselves, and in addition, can be proud of what they have done. I think some teams go a little overboard with adult mentors.

My personal philosophy is that adults should be there to teach. I do not use a tool unless it is to show a student how to use it. If I am ever to run a FIRST team, that will be a rule for all adults.

Some teams have large budgets, some teams have very limited resources. That is not something that can be controlled. The playing field is not level. Even with the best strategy in the world, teams that can have every part of the robot designed by professionals and CNCed to a tenth of a millimeter have an advantage over a low-budget team working in the high school wood shop, fundraising each year to make funds for next year's entry fee.

That being said, my advice would be to get what you can out of the program: what you get out is what you put in. After competition, dismantle your robot and build a new one to do something else - practice building and programming and wiring things up. That's how students learn, and that, at least, is my objective. I would rather have a student built, low budget robot that students can honestly, truly say that they have worked hard on and built, than have a “high-quality” robot that goes to three regionals and wins matches, yet was put together by adults who were interacting minimally with students. It reminds me of student work that was obviously done by the parent who then tries to tell their child that they should be proud of the project as if the child did the work.

Ownership is more important than anything - if students own something, they can be proud of it, no matter what it looks like or how it functions. If the students don't own it, than the project is a charade. A big, expensive homework assignment getting turned in for a grade rather than being done for the sake of learning. If the students are capable of doing it themselves, they should be. If they are not, then a mentor should teach them so they can do it next time, or if that is not possible, then teach them so they understand, so that in the hypothetical situation where they would need to do that process, they would. Getting the students involved in any capacity is what the program, from a broad perspective, is about.

The program is not about kids building robots.

The mentors versus students argument is so dependent on circumstances and individuals that it's impossible to come at it with anything beyond a personal philosophy of how you want things run.

I would not say that the students who have a lot of support and mentors dominating the team are learning more, though they have the potential to. If adults have dirty hands at the end of the day and students are not involved, or are involved only in the periphery, then I would say that something is not right and that team should take a step back and reevaluate their priorities. I think students gain a lot more by doing it themselves: the worst case scenario is failure, and if mentors act like a safety net, that won't happen. That is my philosophy.

Sure, some teams have the advantages of a massive budget or a team of designers, and having those teams in the same competition as teams scavenging parts out of the junk heap makes the competition, taken at face value, very uneven. I think the biggest point that the original poster was striking here is the disparity between team resources. Part of this is alleviated by material and money restrictions, but those are easily bypassed – the result is an uneven playing field, in which resources play a larger part in determining the outcome of the season than designing and engineering.

However, that is the nature of this competition. This isn’t a question of GP – there is no GP. GP is an invented term with a subjective definition. It isn’t real – it exists only as an overarching construct that people can use to guide their actions and their mentalities. GP only applies to you and no one else. This goes for everyone. It shouldn't be used as a shield or a weapon. This also goes for everyone. It is a threadbare and tattered banner that need not be waved around so casually. In my opinion it shouldn't be waved at all. Telling people what they are doing is or is not GP is like arguing over religion. Completely pointless.

That being said, the nature of the competition will not change, and trying to change it is like trying to change the course of a river with a grapefruit spoon and a bucket. Concentrate on making the most of what you have and learning for it's own sake. Try and pick up some scholarship money too. There is no solution to the issues that were aired in the original post.

As another note to this whole mentor and student thing: mentors are important to teach students how to do things Mentors are hugely important to help students learn...by teaching them. Although I feel that students should do the majority of the design and work on the robot, they need some guiding light or they will get lost. What I am against is a team of mentors making decisions that override the wishes and ideas of the students. That contradicts my philosophy of "ownership." I've been in that situation some years ago and it wasn't a good experience for me as a student.

Successful teams aren't just successful because they have resources. A lot of them, in fact probably most of them, would be successful and do what they are doing even without something like the chairman's award to shoot for. It's not right to look at successful teams as products of their sponsorship or mentors. Teams need mentors in some form or another - even if they aren't real-life engineers. Some of the best mentors I've had in FIRST didn't belong to companies or hold engineering degrees. Some teams can't machine things, as noted above. In which case the robot would need to be built without student hands, but there’s a lot more going on than the robot.

I wouldn't get hung up on the competition.

At least that is my perspective.

Re: GP? I think not.
 

That idea is indeed ridiculous. It's also a good example of a straw man argument.

FRC is one of them. Didn't you know?

Re: GP? I think not.
 

Well, I left this thread and CD last night after reading a couple of the wise posts by Karthik, thinking things were moving along well.
Boy, what a surprise.

There are many attitudes that can be displayed by a FIRST member, a FIRST team. Arrogance seems to have tied itself closely to this thread in some of the posts. Usually with arrogance, there is ignorance.

Andy Baker linked us all to one thread in his post, highlighting just one example of the impact that FRC 45 has made on the development of FIRST - inspiring everyone with the innovative engineering and the can-do attitude of Gracious Professionalism. Andy could continue to link us to threads highlighting FRC 45's impact on FIRST and then he could create new threads. He won't but he could.
--
Regarding what is wrong with anonymous posting - it can create distrust and doubt = dis-ease. The ChiefDelphi community is built on trust, support, and integrity - just as many FIRST teams are because of their team members' contributions.

Re: GP? I think not.
 

Apparently brandon here cares, because its not anonymous anymore.

Re: GP? I think not.
 

Another post has pointed out that 254 specifically does not have a plethora of engineers. I'd suggest that any team that does, find one of the have-nots and loan them an engineer or two, for a Saturday afternoon or the whole season if need be.

The first time I ever saw a FIRST pit was in Houston, when FLL was allocated a crowded corner of the Astro Dome. Coming from FLL, where students are supposed to do all the work, and seeing a pit with 6 individuals, the 2 students holding up the robot so the 4 mentors could work on whatever was broken - let's just say I was less than impressed. I have since come to realize that may have been an isolated event at competition. Not isolated in that I've never seen it again. But isolated in that it happens at competitions. Time constraints often dictate that the best person must work on the robot to get it fixed, and we've only got 20 minutes before we have to be headed to the Queue. That doesn't mean the students never worked on the robot and only watched or held parts for 6-1/2 weeks. While there may be such a team around, I'd guess that even the most mentor-oriented teams don't fall into a 100%/0% built ratio.

Someone mentioned design as being a favorite part. In my opinion, students absolutely must be involved in the first aspect of design - concepts. A team needs to use all the minds available to come up with all the ideas possible. Students and mentors alike need to be part of brainstorming sessions. Decide what part of the game is most important. Define what you want the robot to be able to do.

Then go on to the next part of design - figure out how to build it. Here, mentoring might be most important. Mentors have a history of knowing what has worked in the past and what hasn't. Teams can save weeks of useless effort wandering aimlessly toward an unknown design goal. It doesn't have to be a mentor's idea - a student might come up with, "Remember how Team X did it at Y Regional two years ago?" The concepts a team wishes to execute have to be based in solid engineering principles, or you'll have a bucket of parts that keep falling off. Mentors most often, not always but most often, have the experience that will help guide the team in the correct direction.

One of the most satisfying times for Team 1025's parent and engineering mentors was a weekend afternoon midway through build season. We sat in chairs in a semi-circle as students in several groups worked on multiple projects, for the robot, pit and Chairmans. We were happy to let them run without intervention for a couple of hours at least. 9 of those 14 students will be graduating this year, so maybe next year there won't be an opportunity like that. The team may need more hands-on mentoring by showing rather than mentoring by monitoring. But for that day, it clicked. Oh yes, one of the groups was working on our unique arm/tower design that was designed by one of the mentors.

Re: GP? I think not.
 

I've been thinking about this thread for a while and the recent comments about team 45 have inspired me to comment.

We have some powerhouse teams here in Indiana and after my first year I had the same feeling as the original poster, especially about teams like 45 and 71. I was a bit frustrated when I saw their resources and designs and I knew that there was no way that students could have built these robots.

Once I was exposed to the adults and students in these programs I realized how wrong I was. These teams inspired their students to do great work, even if adults were doing a great deal of the design work, the benefits to the students on these teams were obvious, especially when you spend time and talk with the students.

People like Andy Baker and Alan Anderson have taught and inspired me how to work with and teach our students and if you have seen the progress team 829 has made you will see that direct effect.

Four years ago I had the attitude of having the students do everything was the correct way to go. Now I know you let the students do what they are capable of and teach them how to do more. Sometime by helping them do it and many times by doing it and having them watch.

One of the things successful teams do is manage their resources well. There are years when you have students that are great at design and some seasons you don't A good mentor will adjust how much of the work he does depending on the students capabilities. Some years a mentor will help a student refine their design and some years the same mentor is doing all the design but using that design to help teach his next crop of student designers. The same goes for electrical programming mechanical and team administration.

Lastly about the GP of these powerhouse teams. You really learn about GP when you are at a regional and a Big All comes to your pit because he noticed you had electrical problems and wanted to see if he could help, when you are at the championship and a Alan A come to see if you need programming help because he saw you had questions on CD. When a Paul C shares a great tip about improving your drive team without being asked, when a member from a 234 hears you need an expensive part and they give it to you without hesitation.

Re: GP? I think not.
 

When I was in high school, we kicked the mentors away from the robot design. We wanted to be a 100% student built team. We built a couple of decent robots, and won a few awards. When I was in high school I hated "engineer built" robots, so I know exactly how you feel. I was there.

When I went to college and started "mentoring" teams (a new team, and my old team under new management) I met some people who have forgotten more than I will ever know. This was a huge reality check and ego shock.

I can attest that mentoring is probably the most important aspect of this program. Even as a "mentor", I am still being mentored by engineers who work with the team.

Now, most of the students who I was with in high school have graduated the program and never looked back. They go to competitions on Saturday and complain to me about mentors on other teams working on the robots, just as we did when we were students.

And now it is clear to me that we didn't really "get it". Dave was correct. Very correct.

For all of you who think that "student run" is the best way to go.. why don't you put your ego aside and try talking to a professional engineer. Invite them to your build sessions. Ask questions. Sometimes what they say may seem backwards to you, but believe me what you say seems backwards to them. You NEED engineers' help! I cannot stress this point enough.

Re: GP? I think not.
 

I totally, 100%, "I'll buy you a beer when you are 21 for saying that", agree with you. I'd post this on a giant poster, and march around the Georgia Dome plaza with it.

BUT, I think that what many people (including myself), see is that the OP was talking more about teams where the "mentors" huddle around the robot and shout at the students to get tools (at best); where this is their train set, and even though it had juniors name on it while under the tree, it's really for daddy.

I think what we need is what you described. A team where students work with mentors, both taking a back and front seats at the appropreate times, to create a robot, and so both can learn from eachother. That's what FIRST is. Not a robot that is scraped together by a bunch of teens, and not a rocket science bot that only a engineer for 15 years could have built and dreamed up.

To quote one of my brothers, "Moderation in all that you do."

/me tosses $.02 into the pond

Re: GP? I think not.
 

So Im on an ego trip because I have a different veiw of what method is best for learning...

You also seem to just say that you changed opinions when you became a mentor. Thats alright, but I hope you dont consider your opinion more valid just because of the fact that you are a mentor now, because as you said before, alot of students still felt as you did.