Quote:
Originally Posted by waialua359
Actually, it was 4. 
I'd argue that we worked just as hard as you folks. I'd also argue that there are other teams that work even harder than we do but with results that are much less successful on the field. Is it because of talent?
You brought up some good points though. But let me also ask you this. Why was your can grabbers unbeatable? Everyone else in the world saw what 118 did early on during their unveil and week 1 event.
Perhaps....talent? |
I still wouldn't say it's talent, it was mostly a somewhat reckless view of the safety implications. We were just crazier than everyone else so we put a LOT of surgical tubing on those things, cocking them was a 3 person operation. They hit the cans at somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 mph. The whole process of developing those grabbers had a HUGE pile of fail to get the final design.
One interesting thing I have noticed is a lot of teams seem to meet for short hours every or most days during build season(from what I keep reading here on CD). It's typically less efficient to do that from a productivity view, you end up loosing the first and last 15 minutes or so of your meeting times to getting started and cleaning up. That's a big deal when you only meet 3 hours. We get the vast majority of our work done on weekends because we work 9-5 which is 8 straight hours to do things. I know we get more done per unit of meeting time on the all day weekend meetings.
If I had to attribute our success on the field to just 3 things it would be the following in order of value.
1. How we deconstruct every element of the game and rules in our best attempt to determine what strategies will be used at the highest levels of play and selecting what features our robot must have in order to use those strategies, then and only then do we begin to come up with mechanisms to test and later design into a robot.(see post #342)
2. Heavily prototype key robot features to determine the variables that are important for them to succeed and continually iterate our designs and strategies until they work 100% of the time.
3. We put a lot of time and effort into training and practice for all our team members in the off season to maintain and expand our teams knowledge base. A big part of which is building a team culture where veteran students take on mentorship responsibilities with the newer students. In a given year I could give 15-20 students a working knowledge of mechanical fabrication or I could give 4 or 5 students a far greater depth of knowledge that they can then pass on to several others during the time they are on the team, greatly lessening the teaching burden on myself.
Number 2 is made easier by the removal or significant modification of Stop Build Day. Number 3 is also made much easier because when there is less immediate pressure to get something finished and into a bag there is more time to teach, mentor, and maintain the knowledge base of your team. I have seen many teams have a number of students graduate and see the results of the loss to their knowledge base because they were unable to train their juniors with the knowledge they gained over the years. It is so much easier to teach someone when you don't feel like the process is going to slow you down enough to where you will miss a deadline.(see post #337)
Now we do have talented people on our team that contribute a great deal to our overall success, but talent alone is worth nothing without the practice and training to use it well and the time and hard work to make valuable use of it. In almost every single case, talent just means you learn faster than the rest because you have the drive to learn and work hard on your own. Talent is not something you are born with, it's something you were inspired and driven to embrace.
Talent is never enough. With few exceptions the best players are the hardest workers. -Magic Johnson