Quote:
Originally Posted by Macdaddy549
The quality of the work proves that students did not do the fabricating. These teams inspire students by bringing them into their company to watch them build the robot.
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I'll handle these two sentences separately.
1)
So what? If I had a nickel for every hole our kids had to walk with a drill bit, I could probably bankroll our next season. We relied on the USC College of Engineering and Computing's machine shop for a few tasks (mostly involving press fits and a little bit of lathing), and we intended to send our arm tower plates out to Colite International for cutting.
(An aside: we botched some crucial measurements on those plates and didn't catch them until too late in the process, hence we used the box tubing on our robot. But even though we're obviously rolling in cash, we cut down the plates and used them as cross-bracing.)
Drilling a hole straight is a useful skill...but being able to know
where to drill the hole is more important to a budding engineer (which is what we're trying to develop here). Next year, I would love to get back to where we were in 2009 and 2010, making much better use of the machining resources that USC and Colite have made available to us. Time our kids don't have to spend fixing fabrication errors because we involved mentors and professionals is time they can spend on a dozen other things to perfect the robot. (Heck, maybe we won't even need the racing tape.)
2)
So what? If the students are inspired at the end of the day, the team is doing their job and doing it well. How they go about it is none of my business, nor yours. (That said, a team where the students do positively nothing is highly unlikely to be inspiring to others as every team on this list that I've encountered is.)