[AllenGregoryIV]

I will say that I agree with you on most of your post. However I will say that copying or being inspired by minibots can prove to be a great learning experience for students.

At Alamo this year the DiscoBots had several students that were very dissatisfied with the MiniBot that the team had put together. It was a 3 second minibot but they wanted to be faster. We had plans to build a faster minibot and had done some of the numbers but hadn't had the time to do it. While at Alamo several students took it upon themselves to go to the teams that had faster minibots than us and ask them how they did it. (I know the list included 118, 148, and 1429; there may be more I wasn't involved in it). The kids set out on a task to have it built by the end of the regional, they worked through Thursday, Friday and Saturday not stopping for lunch to build an entirely new minibot and modify our deployment mechanism to not only launch the new one but to remain compatible with our old much larger minibot. Thanks to the machine shop at the event for helping them with a lot of the fabrication. They were franticly testing it till the last minute we had to go on the field for what would be our last elimination match (they brought our test pole to the queuing line). It was an amazing act of dedication to the cause. In the end the minibot did not win us Alamo (as you know JVN).

However, it was crucial to our Finalist performance at Lone Star. We were in a situation were we had to beat the 624 minibot up the pole to win the match and they had a about a 6 ft head start on us by the time ours started to climb. The new minibot was able to win the race by a split second and we won the 2nd semi-final by 8 points. We went on to win the 3rd match and head into the finals.

The students involved had worked through the season to build a really good minibot but they still wanted to improve, they learned from others and went about the task. I have very rarely seen teams that copy anything from another robot detail for detail. They build from pictures and adapt ideas and through that process develop a better understanding of the problem.

There have been many examples of design features have been adapted by many teams during the build season. Traction control in 2009 comes to mind. This is the first year where it has been a very crucial part of the game that directly earns a great deal of points.