[TF8]

Team 0,
I agree with your post wholeheartedly. You speak the truth and should not have to stand behind a false name in fear of how people will lash out at you. Anyone who is proud of their "own" work and who worked hard on "their" bot will agree with you and should speak out. However, it is those who did not, who were handed a bot (which I admit may not be their fault) that press the issue and will take shots at you.

Every competetion you go to you can pick out the teams of students who truly learned from their mentors and get involved in the work. And of course there are the teams where the field crew waits outside the pit for the group of engineers to fix the bot pulling extra spare assemblies out of boxes. While looking at a teams bot full of socket head cap screws and asking to borrow an allen wrench the "pit lead" should not refer you to an engineer because they do now know what an allen wrench is.

The line exists, I have been on both sides of it in the last five years. Having a door shut in your face and told "let the professionals do it" is not okay. Teams with overly competative mentors should not stand for this, there is more than winning on the line. The whole idea is learning, and I am willing to bet that a team will learn more fixing their robot after every match because something broke and it only moved for 30 seconds than they will throwing in a new battery every match until their sponsors name is annouced as the winner during the awards.

Things can change, I takes a lot of hard work but nothing is impossible. However you must want to make the change. It is nice and easy to turn screws at week three but if you want to learn and get involved you must take the incentive. Myself and other team members did. We took a sponsor dominated team and made it a way of learning. We packed as many underclassmen as we could get on computers into a lab modeling in pro-e while upperclassmen gave them instruction on 3D modeling, material selection, manufacturablity, safety factors and producing prints that parts could actually be made from.

We used our engineers as a resource, they directed us and we went to them when the upperclassmen got stumped. If they saw a significant flaw or questioned something they expressed their concern and we took their experience and knowledge into consideration. But bottom line the decisions came down to the students. And because of this they will learn more than any school can teach them.

We no longer finished in the fourth week of the build, parts didnt always fit 100% nor work the way that they were supposed to. However what mattered was that kids were learning. The upperclassmen passes down their knowledge to the underclassmen while the upperclassmen gained management and leadership skills. And all were advised and gained knowledge from our mentors. Everyone learned, where it was how to map a drive or change the color of a part or about the relative strenght of hollow shafts for a given weight.

The key to this learning was self incentive. You have to say I want to learn, I dont want to be handed a robot. If your mentors see that you are serious about this things will change. Like with may problems you must admit that there is a problem. Push yourself and your team to learn as much as possible. In the end winning is just a little icing on top of the feeling that you were involved and contributed to the overall cause.