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There's a big difference between constructive criticism, valid questions, nitpicking, and flat-out rudeness, all of which I've seen in various forms over the past few days. Often, the difference is not in what you say, but how you say it. For example, here's a few variations that get accross the exact same meaning:
1. Dude, you better tighten up those chains or they're gonna slip.
2. How well are your chains holding up? We had some problems with a similar setup, but they all went away when we tensioned them a little.
3. Your chains suck. Go tighten them.
Another example, this time relating to student-engineer interaction:
1. Who cares that your bot can lift a stack of 20? The engineers did all the work.
2. Wow! You guys must have had some really good engineers helping out to be able to lift a stack that high!
3. Don't you guys understand what FIRST is all about? It's about students, not engineers. I wish FIRST would DQ teams like yours that have the engineers build everything.
4. <don't say anything as it isn't any of your business>
In response to Jeremy_Mc's post about teaching people, there are also multiple ways of doing it, some more gentle than others. Another set of examples:
1. You're wrong. Go look up the equation for torque in your physics book.
2. I think you may have made a slight miscalculation. Taking the force of your cylinder to be ~150pounds, and given that its mounted 6 inches from the pivot point, I'd say you probably have more like 900in-lbfs (6*150) instead of 30000. It looks like you may have gotten some units mixed up somewhere in the process.
3. Idiots. You're wrong. Have any of you graduated from Kindergarten?
Here's my take on the whole thing: people have just spent the past 6.5 weeks building what they hope is the unbeatable robot. When they finally see what other teams are doing and realize that their precious creation may not be perfect (nobody's is!), they become insecure. Hence, they lash out and find any little flaw to make themselve's feel better and like they are still in control.
Please be nice. Please be kind. Please be helpful. Above all, ask yourself, "If someone said this about my robot, would it make me upset?"
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