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Unread 24-11-2013, 01:12
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AKA: Eli Barnett
FRC #0449 (The Blair Robot Project)
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Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?

Quote:
Originally Posted by BBray_T1296 View Post
What I fail to understand is this: Sometimes I see rookie teams with EXACTLY a kit bot, the same one they built at kickoff! they did absolutely nothing at all in 6 weeks, except make bumpers. I understand some teams have trouble here and there, but c'mon, screw on a 2x4 or something!
I will admit, I used to think along these lines, back when I was a student on 449; I'd walk down the "rookie row" at competitions and wonder, "how could you only come up with this?" It's not such a mystery to me, anymore. Here's a thought experiment that might make it easier to understand:

Imagine that you are a on a rookie team, with no mentors with FIRST experience. All you have is the kit of parts and what materials are available on the FIRST website. No one on the team has any real conception of what's involved in building an FRC robot; not of the time required, of the fundamentals of design, strategy, nothing. You lack raw materials, a machine shop, a working knowledge of the control system. What do you do in six weeks?

From what I've seen, unfortunately, this is the reality for many rookie teams; they get started with no idea of what they're getting into, and it's as much as they can handle to field something which moves at competition. Can you imagine getting a handle on the robot control system with no prior electronics experience, simply by trudging through FIRST's arcane documentation? Yes, there are other resources available, of course - and teams that take advantage of them will be much better for it - but not every team knows about them.

Last year was my first year mentoring a rookie team (4464), and it was eye-opening. Even more eye-opening was the DC team to whom we opened our build space halfway through build season, which consisted, essentially, of 5 students and a high-school teacher with no FRC experience. Had we not done this, and provided instruction, they would not have fielded a working robot; we had our members show their team, step-by-step, how to assemble a working kitbot, control system and all. Our team had been fortunate enough to have a reasonable preseason training program, and the students were familiar with all of the important parts before kickoff. Their team hadn't.

I'm currently involved, in a small capacity, with helping two new teams get off the ground this preseason. Both of these teams have access to people with FRC experience, but it's increasingly clear to me that were they not so fortunate, simply fielding a moving robot itself would be a reasonable achievement.

It's easy to become jaded when you've been with a successful team; the basics seem simple, and it's hard to imagine how anyone couldn't manage them. Take away the resources, the knowledge, all of the experience in the working memory of your team, however, and how much would you realistically be able to do?

Note that this is not meant to say that all (or even most) rookie teams are not capable of doing well (4464's first season was about as successful as I could have dreamed), rather that it's easy to overlook the things which enable that success, and to overlook how a team might end up without them.

The obvious question to ask, then, is how can we improve this? The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is one of "you don't know what you don't know." A rookie team with no conception of the demands of successfully fielding a FRC robot, of the magnitude of the difficulty, doesn't know that they should be devoting large amounts of time to looking through available resources and preparing. I don't think the problem is fundamentally that the resources don't exist for rookie teams (though certainly there could be more of them), but that they're not made visible enough and it's too easy for people to start a team when they really don't have the resources to succeed. A lot of this fundamentally stems from human psychology and cognitive biases which we all deal with; we tend to be wildly over-optimistic in our judgments, and it shows markedly in situations like this.

I could go on, but this is getting sort of long-winded and I think I've covered the crux of what I wanted to say. I will note that I do not think FIRST, on the whole, should be made all that much easier; the challenge is necessary for the proper functioning of the whole system. I think any improvement in this area has to come from better communication of the magnitude of that difficulty.
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Member, FRC Team 449: 2007-2010
Drive Mechanics Lead, FRC Team 449: 2009-2010
Alumnus/Technical Mentor, FRC Team 449: 2010-Present
Lead Technical Mentor, FRC Team 4464: 2012-2015
Technical Mentor, FRC Team 5830: 2015-2016
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