An Ed rant !!
TEAMWORK
If we ran a football team the way some people run robotics teams we would get laughed off the field. If you told your football coach they could save a lot of time and effort if they would wait to the beginning of football season to assemble and build their team……really !
Teambuilding is not valued enough with too many teams. Part of team building is doing things together, and that can be done for free. You can’t build a robot if you can’t build a team. No team, no robot, no nothing. All you have is a robot club of people hanging out building robot chaos. Clubs and Teams are different.
FOCUS
Know what you are trying to accomplish is important. Are you trying to change the culture or are you trying to build a robot ? It turns out you can do both. If you work at doing both you can build a better robot because you will have more resources !!!
COMMUNITY
It took us years to discover it but there is a ton of people out there that would help the team with material or machining or cutting or donuts or pizza or whatever.
When you engage these people you have made them a sort of team member. They see the benefits to society and their future, you get the pizza and parts, a better robot, and culture change to boot. And that is money you didn't have to spend.
Think about it. What use is there in developing an iPad if you don't bother to go find a customer ? What use is there in developing technology leaders of the future if the community doesn't know or care about it ?
Earlier in the thread there was the "grouchy old Ed walking around the shop" comment :
If someone "upward delegates" a problem to me like "where is the whatchmacallit ? " and they are supposed to know where it is, I answer "I don't know or care - if putting it back where it belongs isn't important to you, it isn't important to me."
Let's for a moment pretend I run the ACME company here in town. My thought as president of ACME company could be something like:
If a team "upward delegates" a problem to me like "where is the money ? " I could answer "I don't know or care - if explaining to me the societal relevance of your team isn't important to you, your money problem isn't important to me."
I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm already there. I'm trying to explain to some of these youngin's how the world works.
RESOURCES
“If only we had a ton of money” life would be great. There is a very valuable resource that students have in abundance. Intelligence, creativity, time, sweat. A HUGE part of what we do is spending time in the community rallying support for our team and area teams.
Don't allow people to waste valuable resources: intelligence, creativity, time, sweat, complaining about what doesn’t exist and and lead them toward focusing on creating solutions.
(There are teams on this thread right now that are unaware that some of their funding is a direct result of community outreach we did and grants we wrote, but I digress)
EMPLOYABILITY – YOUR FUTURE
Your future employer is not going to hire you so you can sit and play in a lab while they shove endless piles of money under the door. Hello – wake up, real world.
FIRST is real world. FIRST is a model of your future. Here you can learn how to use those free resources - resources, intelligence, creativity, time, and sweat – solving problem for your future employer.
Think about it. If they didn’t have a problem to solve they would not have hired you in the first place.
That is the definition of an engineer, or at least 'a' definition: someone that solves problems, usually but not always with some significant degree of STEM.
THE ENGINEERING PROCESS
A near constant discussion on CD is related to designing, cadding, building, machining, etc. Rarely is there a good explanation of the spectrum of STEM oriented jobs on CD.
The general public and unfortunately I think too many on CD do not discriminate or explain the difference between:
Research & development engineer, management and operations engineering, 4 year engineering technologist degrees, 2 year engineering technologist degrees, machinist, CAM operators, engineering technicians, technical skills operators, mechanics, electricians, and so forth.
This lack of career literacy clouds the discussion of “What is Best” for a team. The answer is “All of the Above”.
This year, our team most closely approximates what you would see in a typical R&D shop. (student) Engineers do lab work to test ideas, then go to CAD, then outsource the maching/waterjetting. The parts return and the robot is assembled. This is a very close real world model of an R&D lab.
Having an understanding of what ‘space’ your students need to operate in is important to how the team’s engineering design and construction process is done.
THE LONG VIEW
Ask your team some questions.
Does your team know what it wants to do the next 12 months. I’m talking designing and building some robot parts, team building exercises especially the kind that doesn’t involve robot but maybe water balloons and Frisbee. Community service, community outreach, meeting with potential sponsors partners.
Most of what we do is sweat equity. A ton of community donated stuff, a ton of student donated time and effort. And we manage to generate enough cash to build the robot.
The video
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