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Originally Posted by PayneTrain
. I have not always had this perspective and at one time held opinions similar to ZackAlfakir.
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I distinctly remember when you were new to the boards, and the perspective you had. After being away for a couple of years I was very happy to see you are now a regular and productive poster. It was interesting to see the evolution there. Now that we are in the same region please introduce yourself at the Virginia Regional.
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Originally Posted by BenjaminWard
Exactly, this is what ZackAlfakir and I were talking about. It is all well and good if the students are being "inspired" by the success of the mentors, but it is important that they learn what they are doing, which they can only do by actually doing it.
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The issue is you cannot learn engineering through FRC, and the goal is not to learn to be an engineer, or to learn to solder, or to program, or any of these other skill. The goal is to inspire students. Along the way every one, mentors included will learn new skills, and new tricks, but that is a small benefit tacked on to the inspiration. The inspiration is the key, I have worked on teams that built their entire robot out of home depot parts, and on teams with more than 1 mentor per student. I have been on teams with no funding, and on teams with 6 figure annual budgets. I have worked in a build area with access to tens of millions of dollars worth of machining equipment, and in a garden shed. At this point I have seen the full range of team styles in FRC, and I can't say that any style is better than any other. As long as the students are enjoying themselves, and they are inspired then the team is doing it right.
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Originally Posted by mentorDon
I don't have a problem with mentors helping students. You could bring every NASA engineer as far as I'm concerned. My problem is with NASA or other large corporations supplying the manufacturing time and materials for some of these robots. I wrote a letter last year to First expressing my thoughts about these $1,000,000 robots. If the rules were changed so that all materials and manufacturing time were included in the cost of the robot, that would level the playing field for all teams. Time to eliminate the free ride from major sponsors.
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I don't understand this. The ability for teams to receive in kind donations from sponsors is one of the highlights of the program. We could set the budget for actual cost of all items to $X,XXX but all that would do is limit teams, and stifle creativity. There are a dozen other competitions out there with this type of model. FRC is different because of the big corporate sponsorships they are what makes the competition what it is.
My first FRC exposure was 2004, and my first season was 2005. I after seeing championships those two years, I was incredibly jealous of 254. They were a NASA team, in Silicon Valley, their robots look incredibly professional. They were powder coated, and they had a spare at home to practice with. How could we ever compete with a team like that? It took a couple of years before I really understood that there is nothing that special about their robots, or their fabrication process. I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. They are simple, they just work. I cannot recall ever seeing a feature on one of their bots that would not have been fabricated anywhere else in the country. There was no reason other teams couldn't build the same level of machine in the same time frame with resources available in their area. This is the case for 99% of the top robots in FRC.
There is (or rather was) a secret sauce to being one of the top teams in FRC, but it has nothing to do with specific sponsors donating time or materials. However Karthik presents every year at championships on how you do it, and 1114 (and other teams) have posted it right on their website. Timelines, how to analyze a game, its all there.
On a slight tangent, when did NASA teams become a negative thing? There are a ton of NASA teams, covering the full range of competitive levels, and budgets. I recently ran into this with local mentors, and have seen it on here.