Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Van
The primary reason that teams have difficulty "doing" FRC is that they design beyond their abilities. And they should.
When teams (and individuals) push the envelope, they are bound to fail, but hopefully they learn. It would be a great shame if many teams that are "struggling" stopped doing so and simply became "support" teams for those who can really "play the game".
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I respectfully disagree with this mindset.
[rant]
The most inspiration-creating thing for any team that I have seen has always been success on the competition field. However, you did not reference "inspiration", you were talking about "learning", so I will talk about that instead.
In my time in FRC, the lion's share the big learning moments that I have had have come from continuous iterations on designs, not from spectacular fails. Sure, I learned things from these failures, and some of them were certainly necessary for my advancement. However, I should not strive to fail just for the learning opportunity, but rather take my small failures in stride as I incrementally build up my knowledge.
I see no difference for FRC teams.
Many, many teams build beyond their abilities. They often do not realize that their robot will not perform successfully until after their first qualification match. They struggle through competition, do not get selected for elims, then pack up and go home. Maybe when they get back, they look at their robot, and learn a small handful of things about why the design failed.
Then there are the teams that, from day 1 of build, choose less aggressive designs. These teams build robots to play these unglorifying "support" roles that everyone seems to look down upon, but which nevertheless are crucial for successful alliances. These teams may actually get a chance to test out their designs in week 5, and when these designs fail for an unexpected reason, the team still has a week to work out the bugs. These are the teams go to competitions, win more matches than they lose, and get picked for elims. The kids walk away proud that they were successful, and they have probably learned more than the average team, because they had dozens of small failures along the way, each of which required a unique solution.
Why in the world do so many people think that the first team I described is better off than the second? The teams that build "support" robots will still work to tweak, iterate, improve, and practice with these designs, just like any other team. The "chair" as an inbounding device (love it) is not an endpoint, but a starting point. Most teams never even reach their starting point because they strive too hard for the complicated designs.
(Clearly, not all teams fall into one of the above two categories, I illustrate these because I think that the sole difference between the two is the mindset of the leaders on the teams)
[/rant]
I would be surprised if my team didn't build "support role" type robots for the next 2 years, and maybe longer. I'd like to see someone try to tell any one of my kids that they were less inspired or that they learned less this year than the students on other teams who actually built shooters. They will probably laugh right in this person's face.