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Rookie Year
Martin;
In my previous post I shared some of the other facets of FIRST that I've seen over the seven years that I have been participating in this competition. What I forgot to mention, was, that I along with alot of others have had the same or similar feelings our first year in the competition as you have so genuinely expressed. I detected more of a concern than a complaint in your original post. Our first year I think was Hexagon Havoc, and it was a disaster in the robotic sense, but it was phenomenal experience in every other way. Some years the students have designed and built most of the robot and other years, very little. The student involvment depended entirely upon the students on the team. If we had students that had enough machine tool experience and maturity to work under the safety rules of the machine shop, then we had students machine parts. Keep in mind that the liability for a company to have a student in their machine shop is unbelievable to say the least. But, we have had students make parts every single year. Another consideration is the sponsering corporation and their expectations of the team. There are not very many companies that will invest $20K-$40K in a program that allows 15-30 students see what they can do in 6.5 weeks. That would make good copy in the community, but the stockholders would have a vote of "no confidence" against the board of directors. The bottom line is that the sponser expects, in most cases, to see your team do what they saw the other teams do when they were talked into doing this. Another objective that has been mentioned by FIRST is that the machine shops have disappeared from highschools. The students need to start putting pressure on the Board of Education to bring skilled trades back to the highschools or at least make the skill centers more plentiful. I am 54 years old, a Viet Nam veteran Marine, I've built and driven many types of race cars and I still go out west with my Jeep and Mountain bike and hike and backpack and when I went to highschool we had mandatory shop classes and I have benefited greatly from them. I am now a Controls Engineer with 33 years experience. I'm not saying that they should be mandatory, but if you had them in your school it would certainly make building the robot alot easier
I think you'll admit that there is alot of lively discussion that goes with this program. Although there were a few "testy" responses to your posting, overall it was mostly veterans taking the time to share with you some wisdom and there was no rebuke meant.
I certainly look forward to hearing from you after you have survived your rookie year.
Tim Gates
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