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We always start our year with a strategy/design meeting involving both engineers and students where we discuss what we would like our strategy to be and how we would like to accomplish it. Then engineers and students present ideas and we work together to create a workable design.
Once we have a design, the team splits into groups of students led by engineers to build the separate subgroups of the robots. I would not go so far as to say that the robot is built entirely by students, because our engineers want us to learn as much as possible. Sometimes this means the students do a job, and other times the engineers do it to teach the students how. This year especially the students were more involved than ever in building the robot. For one reason, we had a larger team which gave the older students a chance to share the burden of teaching the younger students. Also, the facility we used had more tools than we've had in the past, which allowed more of the fabrication to be done onsite, rather than in the past when all parts had to be driven to our machine shop. This has been a good year for us, and it just makes me sorry i won't be around for next year.
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