Quote:
Originally Posted by Kusha
Sometimes I feel that because mentors have been doing this a long time they don't take into consideration or even test students ideas. The mentality that students can not come up with good solutions, or rather the mentality that the mentors designs are more correct keeps coming into play. Students, if dedicated enough spend as much or more time coming up with solutions, and it isn't all that inspiring to be shot down without any thought or even any testing. I'm saying this from personal experience, sometimes I feel like I have to go on my own to build something to prove it will work and after it does suddenly it is looked at more seriously.
Obviously if students are being inspired then they are going to want to help design and build instead of watching. Watching someone build something leaves something to be desired.
To clarify, I am not attacking any teams in this thread. I am talking about team dynamics.
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On our FRC team I can say with confidence that every idea that has ever made it onto one of our robots has been modified, tweaked, corrected, and/or simplified before going into production. This is normal and happens in real life every day. In my day job I work for a local power utility, we install equipment in the field that will likely be in place for the next 30-50 years. That means the engineer who designed the system is not likely to be around when it is removed. Our control systems and mechanical designs must be able to withstand time (decay) and design brain loss (engineer retirement). Since I support systems designed before I was born and the same will be true for someone else in twenty years, it is imperative to refine ideas until they are in the most simple form possible.
I am not sure exactly what is going on with your team but I would encourage you to think about the advice your mentors are offering you. I simplify systems everyday which gives me experience in taking complicated designs and making them work even better. My guess is your mentors can do the same.
Remember build season is six weeks, it will never be possible to test or refine every idea people present. Sometimes the mentors can see that even after refining, your idea will never get to the starting point of another idea. This experience is invaluable. As a mentor myself the thing I value most is student initiative. Go build a prototype and test it, then try and make it simpler right away, finally make a final case for the design. In the end, I believe in evaluating ideas by removing who designed/created it and then comparing each system side by side, the one that integrates into the entire system (complete robot) the best should be used.
We had some great ideas this year for sorting Frisbees, but I could see right away that they would not fit in our robot design due to orientation and frame size. Students got upset when I wanted to move on because of the same mentor/student idea origination. We are now building a different design that everyone is happy with and to be honest, I am really not sure if any one person came up with the current idea. It has been through so many revisions that it must have 20 sets of fingerprints on it by now. I use this as an example to show how systems evolve; your idea might not be used verbatim now but later a small piece of it may find its way into a much bigger and better design.
Just my $0.02.