[KTorak]

I personally look down on Engineer designed and built robots becuase I always wonder: "What do students learn from sitting there and watching someone else o the work for them?" The answer probably is: "Very little, if anything." FIRST is designed to be a learning experience. An engineer has had numerous years of education and learning expeience. The students on the other hand have had very little, if any education in the engineering field. FIRST helps them gain some basic knowledge in the engineering field, such as trial and error, different design characteristics, assembly and manufacturing pocesses (milling), and much more that many of us already know about. When you have an Engineer or any adult member do all the work, it takes away from the students experience.

I'm proud to say to others that 1023 is all student run. A core group of vetern team membvers (4 to be exact) do alot of the decision making. They come up with ideas, such as a list of regionals to attend, and the rest of the team meets and dicusses our options then votes. When we build our robot, we brain storm after kick-off (at our lockin) to come up with ideas to use. Then we vote on an idea and design it using a CAD program (with some help from our lone engineer mentor). After that, we're more or less on our own. We machine 99% of our parts our self, and do 99% of the work on the robot. The only work that is done by an adult is complex machining (like making a spool to wind our belt lift on). After the robot is built, we test it and our mentor is there to give suggestions on how to improve it if we get stuck and need assistance fixing a problem.

We believe that this system works well because we (the students) learn alot during the build season. Its a great hands on experience to build a robot from virtually nothing. It's an even better experience to be at a competition with a Finalist robot and knowing that you labored over it to make it work. You remember all the hard hours of work that you put into it through out the season.

...Just my $0.02