Quote:
Originally Posted by Poseidon5817
It seems like there is a bit of a shift here from the beginning of the thread to this point. It started off being:
Emphasis mine.
But now it has changed to:
So, again, it seems like the purpose of Connect has changed a little bit. The second alternative is obviously preferable to the first, but still, it seems like a better idea to direct students with questions to CD rather than Connect, even if only to expose them to a place where they can continuously learn from watching and reading other conversations rather than being limited to knowing the answer to that one question they needed an answer to in the first place.
Relying on inexperienced students only to answer potentially difficult questions could also leave a struggling team worse off than they already were, as well as potentially denying them access to a wealth of other interesting, unrelated knowledge in the future. Who can say they haven't learned something new from keeping up on the newest threads here? I'm reminded of the old saying, "give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and feed him for life." If you show a student a place where they can find answers to almost any FRC-related question, they will be able to get quicker answers in the future rather than waiting hours/days on a response from a student every time their code crashes or a Talon isn't getting power, as well as getting the knowledge of people who actually work in the engineering field. And this isn't only related to CD. It is an obvious fact that the more people you have, the better it will be.
Just my $0.02.
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Thank you.
The intention was always to be able to direct students to mentors in the event that they needed it (after all, 95% of F4 is from CD), but it looks like Sam forgot to include it in his initial post. I trust the people in F4 to recognize when something is out of their scope more than I trust a complete newbie to join CD on their own. Most of the students I know that avoid CD do so by choice, not due to ignorance.
Many times I've encountered students who were too afraid to get mentors on their own team or strangers from other teams to help them. I have a sneaking suspicion that the the type of questions we'll get usually won't need the extra help that CD offers, but like I said: it's definitely on our list. The frequency depends purely on how often we get questions that would be better answered on CD or by an adult.
On the time to respond: I'm reasonably certain we'll be able to get back to any student within a few hours (the benefit of having people from different time zones in on this), but we won't know until we try.