Quote:
Originally Posted by Tungrus
My biggest challenge this year will be to minimize external distraction. At least few team members will watch YouTube and will comeback with half baked ideas, not understanding the engineering behind the design process and insisting on doing like "they" did. To add to some parents will come prepared with video loaded on iPad and try to challenge those who are practicing engineering best practices. Anyways this is my challenge and I have to learn to deal with it.
|
Roy Plunkett invented Teflon by trying to make a better refrigerator. His experiment completely failed but he took samples of the material he made a found he made a material that achieved a different necessity.
Harry Coover tried to use cyanacrylates as a moldable polymer. It completely failed because its so sticky. However, he realized it was sticky enough to hold two materials together thus inventing superglue.
One can argue in hindsight that their original ideas were bad however these inventors were operating in the unknown. Their flawed ideas yielded a great invention.
Last year, I had a picture I took in 2011 of 1114's drivetrain that my students saw. We like the drivetrain but that is not what inspired my students. They liked how 1114 mounted their wheels and my students used that method to hold our shooter wheel. We never had an argument about if we should use our west coast drive versus 1114's drive. Frankly I don't think we could argue if one was superior. Time was precious, thus we picked west coast drive based on our collaboration with 766.
A lot of these examples require an idea to be prototype, to be experimented with. That consumes resources so not every idea can move forward. I disagree that a team should limit "distractions." The challenge is to condense a reservoir of ideas into working prototypes and functioning mechanisms. The process can get gruesome as ideas are dropped. Last year, we had two climber concepts but barely enough time to do one, so the other was cut. We tried two shooters; linear and curved, but our linear shooter lagged behind the curve shooter. We had to drop it to focus on a design that was working.
About 3/4 of our teams mentors are parents. A lot of parents want to help and have ideas, a key transition is to get parents to join as full-fledged mentors. Some will suggest ideas that don't appear to help but its a clue that they want to help. Also, I really try to cut the egos from ideas, some people get very attached to their ideas and that makes it difficult to have productive discussions. I wish I had resources to say "go build it, show us how great your idea is." That is just not practical. We do say, if your idea is to be pursued in prototyping, you are expected you to be part of the prototyping process. We want people to take ownership of their work.
The best thing I can suggest is to research and develop a formal design process. This will help manage the flow of ideas. My team uses one based on Ideo's method. I got it from a documentary I saw about them. We have a timeline that we try to adhere to, this year will be the strictest schedule yet, we can't afford to endlessly talk ideas. We also have a design spec, and ideas must address the design objectives. Some ideas will cause us to redefine our design spec but this should help you make people say more than, "they did it so it must be good." They will have to articulate their ideas.