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Unread 24-02-2005, 17:04
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Richard McClellan Richard McClellan is offline
Engineering Mentor
FRC #0254 (Cheesy Poofs)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: May 2004
Rookie Year: 2004
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Posts: 322
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Thumbs down Re: If you could change one thing....

As far as the build goes, I think our robot was very good....especially compared to last year when the only thing we had working was the drivetrain. I wish we could have finished our work on the autonomous period, but unfortunately, we had some major team issues two days before shipping. I wish we had mentors like some of the ones described here. Our mentors did nothing but stand around talking about work like they didn't want to be there, criticize new ideas that students came up with and think of every possible reason why it will not work.

Lastly, and worst of all, two days before shipping, all of our mentors refused to stay past the scheduled end time (6:30 PM), which we knew was necessary if we wanted an autonomous period. Our lead/only programmer and I (President) came back later that night intending to finish up the autonomous period, which was necessary if we wanted to have any chance of winning; however, one of the mentors showed up because of suspicion and was extremely angry about us being there. He literally took the robot hostage to his house, cancelled most of the meeting time the next day (because he was at work and couldn't bring the robot back), just to prevent us from working on the robot any more that night. Because we were told not to come back, the team now did not have any code written (our programmer had it all).

So, the night before shipping, all of the mentors start to realize that they are in trouble without the code, so they worked until 1:30 AM on the morning of shipping to get some basic drive code to work. So, while our mentors put family over finishing the autonomous period, they obviously cared about the drive code.

Hopefully next year, we'll have either better mentors or no mentors at all. This year they only hindered the progress of the students.
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~ Richard McClellan ~
Former Student on 1477 | Northside Roboteers | 2004-2005
Former Lead Mentor for 2158 | ausTIN CANs | 2007-2010
Current Mentor for 254 | Cheesy Poofs | 2013
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