Quote:
Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi
Not all teams have the funds to buy things to prototype with, and rookies especially don't always have an inventory of old parts to use and work with.
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This effect, especially, was
huge for team 4464 last season. Our robot (minus the kitbot base) was made almost entirely with donated materials and scrap we could pick up from local shops. No way could we afford to spend on parts for prototypes that had any chance of not panning out; many of the parts from our first prototype shooter ended up on the final thing, and we purchased them knowing this would be the case and would not have purchased them otherwise. This would not have been possible without Ri3D.
Would it have been nicer, in an ideal world, to have been able to prototype more systems than a Ri3D-esque linear shooter (complete with AndyMark pneumatic wheels)? Yes, of course; but the world is not ideal. I don't think anyone could look at our robot from last year (a tall full-court shooter) and claim that it was a carbon-copy of the Ri3D robot or that our creative process was stifled, but Ri3D was a massively helpful resource in making fundamental design choices early on by removing many of the unknowns that we simply could not afford to figure out ourselves.
It's also worth noting that 449 prototyped a very large number of potential systems, most of which had nothing at all to do with the Ri3D design.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wilsonmw04
FIRST isn't about kids solving issues. If that's what you want, there are several STEM programs out there that require kids do all the work.This is what FIRST is about: teams using the tools they have in different ways to inspire kids while solving a problem. Let teams use all the tools they want.
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I would be wary of this line of thinking. I think one of the biggest potential pitfalls of FIRST is allowing it to become a proxy competition for professional engineers. I was not "inspired" when I was a student by watching mentors design and build a robot, I was inspired (and gained a very large amount of incredibly useful experience) by
doing it, along with my other team members. I would not have participated had it been otherwise, nor do I think, if it had been that way and I had participated, that it would have been nearly as beneficial.
My philosophy as a mentor (which I have cribbed largely from 449's senior mentor, to whom I am greatly indebted) is that my
ideal job is to ask questions to get students thinking along the right lines, and to show them things they do not yet know. It is not to design and build the robot; I am a facilitator, not an agent, of that. Of course this is not always the practical reality; I will not shy away from getting hands-on if I think it is necessary, but I will try my hardest to never lose sight of the ideal.
I agree fully that Ri3D is a fantastic resource and, in general, the more resources available to the students the better. I also think it's very important to be mindful of the line between offering the students resources and performing the task yourself.