Quote:
Originally Posted by DareDad
I think we may be talking to different rookie team audiences. When I say rookie team I'm thinking of 6 kids and 2 adults working in a garage on what would be a shoe string budget if they hadn't already used the shoe strings to hold the battery in the robot.
I see a dozen teams each year matching that description. Half the time they don't have a functioning robot on Thursday morning. Yes, a sustainable team with ISO 9000 certification is awesome, but functional needs to come first.
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If a rookie team is physically isolated and does not know of any resources such as CD or other teams, or they absolutely refuse any outside help, for whatever reason, I can see them showing up at a tournament with a half-assembled KOP. Otherwise, I do not see any excuse for a rookie team not to learn and stretch and try to score in some way, even if they ultimately fail. I think last years game where defense was prohibited was the GDC's reaction to seeing too many Defense Bots.
We worked with several total rookie teams last year. One from out of our area had 4 or 5 students and 2 adults. At one tournament, we were able to give them ideas on how to improve their scoring mechanism and directed them to an established team that was doing well with a mechanism similar to theirs to get more ideas. Over the course of 2 1/2 days, they went from just struggling to pick up a single tote to being able to put up stacks of at least 2. At the next, tougher Regional, they were able to improve their ranking relative to their ranking at the first. Another rookie team in town would visit us every two weeks or so and work along side our team or would visit our generous friends at Spectrum to get advice and access to tools and materials they did not have. They had about 8 students and a team parent with no technical skills who mainly signed paperwork, helped to pay for things and drove the students around. I don't recall seeing him pick up a screwdriver or a drill. Their ranking at the end of the tournament wasn't great but they kept a positive attitude and learned from us and other teams in the process, saw that they could do the things that teams ranking higher than them did and were excited to do better in the future. I think I just described "Inspiration"...