Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
At one of our district events, FRC judges came in and asked our team, a few dozen times, in a few different ways, who built the robot. Before entering our pit, I happened to overhear that they were trying to figure out "who the mentor built robots are". The questions they asked my team were "gotcha" questions, all phrasing essentially the same question in different ways until the kids referred to a sponsor or mentor as having helped with some portion of the robot, at which point the judges would harp on that point. I believe these were the culture judges, not the technical judges, and they simply would not ask about anything other than different ways to phrase the question "did your mentors build and program the robot". We were not asked about our STEM outreach, our business plan, our team spirit, and ultimately I can't help but fear we were disqualified from those awards at that district because our kids' answers to the "mentor built" questions didn't pass the judges' standards.
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I wasn't there when our students were being judged at one of our regionals, but that was the impression that they got as well. The judges were looking for a gotcha as well. The judges figured out that our vision code wasn't student programmed, and then were done talking to the students. Completely ignoring the fact that the students contributed in other areas, and that the number of students inspired by us having cool vision was way higher than would have been the case if the entire project had dropped through the cracks. We target similar amounts of work on a subsystem being done by students as by the mentors, and that's perfectly legal by the rules, and our decision. We have students doing code reviews, writing unit tests, and helping simulate how the robot works, and assume that is how all code is written. That's a huge success, and is only really possible with significant mentor involvement and drive. Next year, I think we'll have the students tell the judges that "they found a library to do that" to deflect those questions.