Quote:
Originally Posted by LeelandS
Before the "mature" brainstorming session, we open up the floor for ridiculous ideas. We openly tell the students (and mentors) to throw out any over-the-top ideas they can think of. One students suggested strapping a rocket to the back of the robot and just driving up the side of the pyramid.
The reason we have team members throw out these ideas is that the most ridiculous ideas can have just a bit of brilliance in them. We thought about that student's suggestion and thought... "Why can't we just drive up the side?" This led us to brainstorming, prototyping, and designing a climbing system very similar to 118's mechanism from their reveal video. We had the system mostly ready to go before abandoning it. We're just not a team with the resources to make it work.
Don't discount the ridiculous suggestions. I guarantee, one of the "legendary" teams got their first incredible design off of a "dumb" suggestion. Just remind students that when the time to work comes, to be focused on the task. Once they've been properly introduced into the program and understand that this is the one time where adding flamethrowers and buzzsaws doesn't solve your problems, things should simmer down. But NEVER toss out the ridiculous suggestions.
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I agree with this. I grew up with Odyssey of the Mind and there we had to come up with the most ridiculous ideas, because the emphasis was on crazy and creative ways to complete the task (2011-2012 Ooh-Motional Vehicle: build a vehicle that travels a course and displays human emotions).
My OM team was taught to start brainstorming with the most ridiculous and insane ideas, write them down, and draw lines connecting ideas that inspired each other. After we stopped laughing we would go through the list and narrow down the most feasible and appropriate solutions. We found the first part to be more helpful than we thought, because we went back to our old brainstorming sheets and saw that a lot of our best ideas were spawned from the craziest ones.
I admit that this is not necessarily the best process for FRC, but I vehemently abhor discarding ideas because they are "dumb" or "stupid". I feel that it sends the wrong message and is against the spirit of science and engineering. You can see throughout history that great inventions came from both mundane and fantastical inspirations (velcro, cell phones, among others). It's wrong to scuttle someone else's boat because you don't think it's seaworthy. You probably don't know that what you were seeing will be called a submarine, and you never know what new submerged continent, sunken civilization, or new species they will discover.