[cbolin]

Hi,
Most of our mentors and students are focused upon the robot design and build. The competitions spend a Thursday, Friday and most of Saturday focused upon the objective of playing these robots to win.

The two highest awards (Chairman and Engineering and Inspiration) in reality seem to be the measure of relatively few mentors and students during the year. I know there may be some exceptions.

So, from the perspective of a lot of us mentors and students its about building a robot that can compete...having fun doing so and keeping the kids excited about it even when our bots don't do so well.

A better question is this Ken. Is FIRST a robot building CONTEST for ADULTS?
I have attended four competitions now and have noted that over 1/2 of the teams have adults (mentors) programming, repairing, modifying, coaching and strategizing. Many instances, the kids are just standing around watching. Fortunately, FIRST allows the kids to drive...otherwise adults would be driving the robots as well.

I am a confident and capable programmer. I am able to do lots of things in autonomous mode....but the point is to get the kids excited about programming. So, we spent a lot of time mentoring them to program (start in December with lots of Saturday training). In fact, we give them last year's robot to practice programming before our new bot is ready. During the competition, it was up to the kids to figure out what they wanted in autonomous and how to program it. I gave general advise when they asked but refused to write a single line of code. It is absolutely incredible what kids can do under pressure and with good mentoring and training.

I think we need better preparation for training our mentors to back up and let the kids in..even if it causes us to perform more poorly in the competition...who know, there is an equally good chance that robots would do better if we adults stayed out of the way. :-)

Regards,
Chuck