In college, one of my friends had a professor for CFD/FEA who had made it a central theme of the class to avoid
"Garbage in, Garbage out." Taking the phrase a step further, can you really understand the output if you don't understand what the process the model goes through is?
Thanks to educational discounts, there is a ton of really powerful software available to teams. How do you make effective use of it? What kind of training do you make available to students to help them understand the kinds of decisions they are making? You can't cram 4 years of class into 2 weeks of design, or even the 24 weeks of FRC you get in a HS career.
Put another way, what do you get out designing another West Coast Drive if you don't understand the difference between a cantilevered and simply supported beam? Do students need to know that, or can you hand down enough rules of thumb that they get an intuitive understanding so that the right kinds of decisions just get made?
Same thing goes with OPR. If you use it in your scouting methods, do you have kids that understand the linear algebra? Or is it more of a handwavy "This is how it works, this is where it might break down" that comes from the top?
I'm sure there is a goldmine of experience here.
