[apache8080]

Originally Posted by AustinSchuh

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.

I have heard of other students and mentors saying that about other teams but I didn't realize that judges were doing that also. It is a shame that people think that any robot that works really well and also looks well engineered is done entirely by mentors. This is really something that has made me angry over the last few years because you will find many people who try to take credit away from students who worked really hard to make a good robot by claiming it was mentor built.