Quote:
Originally Posted by martin417
Part of being inspired to enter a STEM field is the realization that "hey, I can do this!". If FIRST published a set of plans, and the kids just followed the plans, I doubt they would get that feeling. While I understand that Ri3D and others is not a set of plans, I do believe that a teenager (notorious for taking the easy way out) will have a tendency to watch the videos rather than try to come up with their own unique concept.
The biggest challenge we as mentors face is to reign in our own enthusiasm and let the kids come up ideas. I absolutely believe that we can help, influence, guide and correct without giving them the answer on a silver platter.
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And I think that with resources like Ri3D to use as guides, those kids can, in a way, get their feet wet without drowning. Watching the videos points them in the right direction, but it doesn't give them everything they need. If we take the mean team that actually "relies" on Ri3D for design inspiration (since I think this population is what people are focusing on), they're also more likely than others to be the ones that don't have access to all the fancy tools and big sponsor help. They're the ones who will need to improvise a little and make do with what they have.
Imagine for Ultimate Ascent that a team sees Ri3D's pneumatic-wheeled shooter and thinks, "Hey, that's probably what we should do," but then finds out that they don't have any pneumatic wheels that will work. Now their challenge is to replace those wheels with ones they can find that will still suffice. That's something that can be tackled by said team, and they're learning how to solve problems at that level. This episode is repeated a number of different times, each of relatively small scale. Trying to start from scratch would have been monumentally over their heads, but now it's broken down into bite-sized problems that still allow them to grow.
Essentially, Ri3D is the only vehicle by which some teams can reach that "Hey, I can do this!" moment, while without it all they would have said was "I guess I can't."