Quote:
Originally Posted by zzzag
FIRST is supposed to be for the student team members. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. How many threads have we seen complaining about robots that were clearly built by the mentors? The students should be the ones designing, building, and testing a robot (IMHO), and this includes selecting parts to go into a robot/team. And yet here we have a system that forces the mentors to do the selection and ordering of parts in a crazy race-for-the-computer during the day while many of them are working (for the first round, at least). By the time our school day ended and we were able to gather the team's student leadership to complete the order with our mentor, a mere three hours after FC opened, all of the parts we desired most were gone - compressor, battery, cRIO, classmate, even the multimeter (if I remember correctly). We ended up with a decent haul including a few window motors, some tools we've put to good use this build season, and a battery mount we won't use in this year's design, but the fact remains that we're still using a compressor, cRIO, and Classmate that have been with the team at least as long as I have (pretty sure the first year of the Classmate was my first year also) and running on three working batteries.
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I see your point and I wholeheartedly agree that the robots should be student built and student designed. After all, what is the point of FIRST if we are taking the mentors who presumably already know what they are doing and let them have free reign with everything. That being said, there really is not a way that I can think of to change the system and I believe that it should stay the way that it is, the spirit of FIRST is not winning, it is learning.
Secondly, our team has the same problems as yours but to solve it we show the FC page to all student subteam leaders before the order day. Then with their subteams they pick out items that they might want and put them in a spreadsheet. We review eachother's choices to make sure that multiple teams are not requesting the same item, and if they are we place it higher on the list. Then the finalized list is given to the head mentor who places the order basically as soon as FC opens.
It is by no means perfect, but I think that we do a good job of maximizing student involvement while not sacrificing too much from FC. I agree that the points pricing needs reconsideration and there should be a limit on the maximum quantity of items (like talons). No offense to 4124 and 229, I applaud your use of the system and how well you work together.
Please check out
ANY of our team's robots, you will quickly see that they are student built. You could hear the gears of last years shooter over the CMP webcast
