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Re: What was there before AndyMark?
I have been around as a mentor since 2000 and I can tell you that things are so much better now and way more competitive now at every level. Every team has the ability to focus on innovative design concepts, rather simple reliability. As mentioned previously most matches were won or lost by counting how many robots were stuck driving in a circle.
In my opinion the current KOP rules more closely simulates the real world of engineering anyway. I worked as a designer in the food & packaging industries for many years. Most of the designs in our industry were a collection of COTS parts that were custom packaged for our design task. Truly custom design was only performed on about 25% of the overall production line and about half of that was outsourced.
In my industry if your boss found you spending hours designing an unproven custom gearbox when you could have purchased it from a catalog in 10 minutes, you would have a lot of explaining to do. Why not use your time to create innovative overall designs rather than solving problems that have already been solved. Its a valid question.
Its important for the kids to understand how a gearbox works, but they do not need to design it from scratch to have the full engineering experience.
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2010 Championship Chairman's Award
2016 MAR District Champion (thank you 225 & 1257)
2016 Galileo Division, #6 Seed, 9 W - 1 L
2016 MAR District Innovation in Controls Award
2016 Westtown District Finalist (thank you 4954 & 484)
2016 Westtown District Imagery Award (It took 17 yrs)
2016 Hatboro District Judge's Award
Overall Record 49 W - 21 L
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