[Chris Hibner]

I always like to win. I enjoy seeing really cool features and mechanisms, but if it doesn't help us win, I don't really want it on a robot.

We have one guy on our team who just LOVES fancy robot mechanisms. All the time this guy says, "hey did you see team XXX with their cool YYY feature? We should've done something like that!" At which point I usually say, "Yes, that was really cool. Very good engineering. However, how would that help us win the game?" At this point the other guy usually says something like, "uhhhhh. Hmmmm. But it was so COOL!"

Fancy mechanisms are cool and all, but I always like to ask, "how does it help us win?" Engineering is about finding the best way to accomplish an objective. The objective of this engineering test is to win the game (at least that's how I see it).

EDIT:

Perhaps I misread the question so I'll answer it a different way. If you meant: Would you rather have a great robot, or a crappy one that rides the coat-tails of a great robot to win the event? I would have to answer that one differently. I would rather have a great robot.

The reason I first answered it the other way is because in the past I've seen some robots that were engineering marvels, but were strategy disasters. I thought, "that is really cool - completely useless for the game, but COOL!" Our team prides itself on coming up with robots that play the game strategically well every year. It may not be the fanciest, but it wins (this year was an exception, but the robot we came up with never made it to the field - we had to punt).