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Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang
I'm sure there are teams out there that get (falsely) blamed of a big budget and a mentor-ran team.
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Your choice of the word "blamed" is interesting. Should teams be ashamed if they have big budgets and a structure where mentors play a large role in the running of the team? I think that is something for which to be grateful and/or proud.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang
If the best way to inspire someone is to have robots be built by people much more skilled than him/her, then wouldn't it make sense to have the most skilled people build the robots? And by that extension, wouldn't it make most sense to have demonstrations of robots built by top NASA engineers instead of competitions?
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Top NASA engineers are indeed involved in the building of the robots of several FIRST teams. It's a shame there aren't enough top NASA engineers to go around. The point is not to put a bunch of students in a workshop with no direction, and it's not to completely obfuscate the engineering process from the students. It's to build a bridge from what the student currently knows to what engineering is all about. To work alongside engineers to see what their life entails and realize "hey, I can do/enjoy this!" Alongside sometimes means that you are doing while they watch, but also that sometimes they do while you watch. A professional engineer with a lifetime of training can do some amazing and inspiring things that (the vast majority of) high school students cannot.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang
A competition implies that there is some form of fairness involved. If every team is mentor-built and mentor-ran, FRC might as well be renamed First Robotics Demonstration.
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There are all sorts of measures involved with FRC to ensure that fairness is involved. Weight, budget, control system, fabrication window, allowable motors, the game rules. Limiting the participation of mentors places an artificial ceiling on inspiration for no other reason than to lower the bar of competition. Many in FRC have been inspired by incredible robots built by elite teams. Did engineers work on them? Absolutely. Does that make them less inspiring? Of course not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang
FIRST might not be all about student built/ran teams, but I thought there was something in there about inspiration. And the maximum way to achieve that is have students do as much as they can. (The more they do, the more they learn, the more they will want to do it. Hence, the definition of inspire.)
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Having the students take ownership and pride in their robot is an important part of FRC (in my opinion). But ownership and pride don't mean that the students have to do the entire thing themselves. Making CAD drawings that get turned into perfect parts by a CNC or water jet is taking ownership (and this is far closer to what a real world mechanical engineer does than making everything himself). Prototyping several iterations of a mechanism until it is perfect is taking ownership, even if the final version on the robot was fabricated by a sponsor (your prototypes essentially designed the final mechanism). Perfecting a game strategy that your robot executes is taking ownership.