Chief Delphi - Poll on who builds your teams robot.

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Re: Poll on who builds your teams robot.

Skunkworks robotics (Team 1983) is very proud that our robot is built by our team. The premise of our team is everyone works together using their own abilities and resources. Students learn from mentors..... mentors learn from students.... we make no distinction...

We are proud of our team.... We don't equate 100% student built with our ideal of the best way to run a team.
Other teams may want to handle their teams this way. It is not our way but it does not make us any "less" of a team..
Unfortunately many teams seem to think this way....

Teams should be proud of their own teams for a variety of reasons...
Most spirited, most gracious, most professional, any number of reasons....

Skunkworks is equally proud of the approach that we use. We have had many of our graduates go on to engineering education and everyone on the team has learned a great deal about themselves and this includes all of the mentors, parents and coaches as well as the students. We have done pretty well for a little fourth year team from a 400 student high school in Des Moines Washington... We are very proud that over 10% of our student body is on our team.

We design, manufacture, build, operate, scout, fund-raise, etc and have a great deal of fun as a TEAM. no distinctions...

Good luck to everyone this year..!! See you on the field!!
We will be in Portland, Seattle and Atlanta...

Re: Poll on who builds your teams robot.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pavan Dave (Post 885541)

Taking pride in not having engineers and building robots that work but perform like crap [for a lack of better words] is not the goal of FIRST. Sure you learned something but the fact of the matter is you could have gained more if you had a few engineers go "if we did this, you could ____" and in turm could have done better in competition.

I take comments like "100% Student build and proud" are worthy of a "Certificate of Ignorance/Arrogance"

I've jumped from a team where there was a lot of mentor involvement to one with very little.

At some times involvement was to the extent of around 40-50% (because students were not allowed to use the machines due to facility rules) but the ideas, were 80% students, they were just fine tuned with trial, error, and experience.

Now at a school where there is 80% involvement, sure the students can do a lot, they have to make with whats there, but they could grasp so much more if they had the experience I had when I was a student, and we're currently getting more mentors in more advisement and experienced roles.

Students have an idea. Engineers work with students to turn their ideas into a competitive robot. The rest is up to the Coaching staff...So if you're in the Dallas area and you're looking for an offensive coordinator position for a robotics team, we're taking resumes!

Pavan Davé

THIS is exactly what i meant. thank you Pavan for saying it a lot better than i could

Re: Poll on who builds your teams robot.

2022 is an about 95% student run, student built, student designed team. The students do everything, from brainstorming to final product. Our mentors are there to allow us to use the tools, and assist when asked (most problems can be solved by our student board).

Just because we are a student run team does not mean that we are any less than your team. We are very proud of what we created last year. Not many teams can say that they built a fully functional swerve drive with absolutely no offseason building and very limited machining capability.

The thing that is great about FRC is the freedom that you are allowed. It doesn't matter what system you have, just so long as the end result is that students are inspired. With our system, all of our alumni are in college, and almost of them are in a STEM field.

Re: Poll on who builds your teams robot.

Quote:

Originally Posted by big1boom (Post 885585)

While I agree with you that you should be proud of your accomplishments I am going to also apologize that you just don't seem to understand the fundamental difference between FRC and many other robotics competitions.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dave Lavery

The real message I’ve got is for those teams that have chosen to not have mentors participating in your teams. I want to ask you to think about it again. If you have chosen to do this problem without mentors on your teams, technically yes you are probably going to be able to compete and play the game. It’s going to be tough, it’s going to be harder but you can probably do it. It’s certainly reasonable. But if you have chosen to not have mentors on your team and to do this by yourselves, you’re missing an opportunity to work side by side with some of the best engineers in the world. You’re missing an opportunity to learn from some of those creative and innovative designers that are out there. You’re missing an opportunity to be inspired by some of the best problem solvers in the world. Realistically, you’re missing the point. What we want you to do instead, to all those teams and all the teams that already get it and understand the role of the mentor we want you to instead to dare to try to do something different. Dare to try to learn about problem solving and doing things in a different way. Get outside of your comfort zone. Let the mentors show you something that you’re not used to doing. We want you to dare to be exposed to new ways to think we basically want to dare you to be inspired. That’s what we want you to take away from this program.

I would also like to point out another common misconception, FIRST isn't about the students. http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...7&postcount=23 You can be proud of your work but in the end you aren't making as big an impact as you can.

I also feel I have to pose a question, if your alumni decide because of FRC that they DON'T want to go into STEM are they a failure? I would call them a success, not to discourage people but to encourage them to follow what they want not what they have been told they want. So while saying that 99% of our alumni go into engineering may be a great thing to some I would be happier to hear 99% of our alumni go into something they love doing.

I will close this post with yet another link to an older thread http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...4&postcount=41 I suppose you are right that it doesn't really matter that you are all student built but as someone who looks up to mentors I feel you are missing out on something special.

Thank you for listening to my inane dredging of posts from yesteryear.