Quote:
Originally Posted by davidthefat
It is also the mentality of the team and the members. If you choose to just pick up tools and make a robot beginning at the 6 week build season, you might just have trouble. But if your team has been prepping over the off season and getting work and experience done, you are in a better position than a lot of teams. In my honest and humble opinion, what makes a team great is not what they do during the 6 weeks, but what they do the rest of the year.
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YES! You have to know what your team is at competition for. Some schools come as with FRC as a second thought to their stem programs, and thus the robot is a second thought. Some teams come with FIRST as a class in school. Some teams come as a complete package. Some teams come a product of the manufacturing department of their school. Some come from the science department (of their school). Some teams come from marketing. The culture of the team really tends to define the end product.
Culture change is doable. During the last two years, 706 has been attempting to change our culture to be one of the "package" teams and not just pure business and manufacturing (we spend a LOT of time in the machine shop). In our area there are teams like 537 who seem to do everything (you guys are awesome!) and we look up to them. We have attempted to change that over the few years to incorporate more community involvement and such. We build great robots, but the other side is actually turning out to be more difficult! (But that is just the culture of community).
I used to take part in some of the earlier described situations (until I heard them said about us). Some of this came from our team's culture, some came from actual experiences that may trigger such thoughts. Ideas such as not building your robot can stem from having non-knowledgeable members in your pit. I distinctly remember talking to a person that did not know if his team had a 6W or 8W tank drive. You may not realize that this person that you are talking to may not actually have been on team (as in my case) or may be a very new recruit seeing what competition is like!