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handing students fabricated parts and having them bold them together is not what this is all about
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Sorry but I have to post about this statement too. I am High School sophmore and this year, as you may or may not know, 229 worked with the Thunder Chickens(217) to create a tower that worked to both teams advantage. While we students didn't fabricate this extendo, we had a lot of input on what we wanted it to do. We also helped to design some of the features of this tower. Sure there might not have been as much input as previous years due to the distance between the 2 teams and such. Yet we still put together a robot with a lot of student designs and ideas in it. There will, for as long as i am on this team, be a lot of student fabrication, design, and build put into 229's robots.
We don't have your GM engineers or profesional machinists, we have a bunch of college kids and high schoolers building a robot. In the end I think I like this better, these college kids are always open to our ideas and designs. They stress the importance of student ideas during the design and build process. Example: I had designed a gripper for our robot this year. At the meeting when i was going to present it, we were shown a design one of the college kids came up with. I told the mentors how much better I liked this design, but they still insisted on taking the time to go over the design with me. Me and a few other students then helped to make the lance design we are now using better. My original idea may not have gone on the robot, but alot of other ideas of mine went into making our lance/robot better.
Last year i got all excited about a couple of chain tensioners i had designed/built/assembled for the robot. This seemed to me to be a huge acomplishment for me as a freshman. After we got the robot back from Nationals I sat and stared at it. I could list off all of the parts i helped to design/build/assemble/fix.
When you look at these robots or talk to the students, I'm sure they can tell you about how they were inspired by their mentors and the entire build process. Whether they designed a part of the bot or not. They are, most likely, still inspired by the experience. It may not even br the building that inspires them, to go on into the fields of science and technology, it's really the experience that brings them back
As for students in the pits, we have a pit crew of around 5 people. Two college students and three high schoolers, I also jump in if there is work that needs to be done. whenever there is a job that needs to be done, there is a high schooler on it. the college students are there to make sure it gets done correctly. And if we don't know how to fix something, they are there to teach us how.
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The end point is that a lot of inspiration can be had on both ends of the spectrum. I don't ever want to see the highly engineered robots go away; after all, that's what makes all of the people in the stands say "WOW - I wish I could've done THAT!" To me, there's a lot of inspiration in that.
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I agree. These highly engineered robots are one of the big reasons i come back every year. I am always saying, "John, can you tell me how that works?" or "Carne, can we build one of those for the robot?" Last year at Nats i took a walk down murders row and stood staring at Wildstangs bot with all the sheet metal fabrication and asked John, "We really need to do that next year, can we?" These amazing robots may be designed largely by engineers, but they always inspire me.
Sorry for my long post and incessant ranting. I am also sorry if I got a little off topic. And if it may not all make sense
, these are my feelings and may not reflect those of my fellow team mates.
I don't have anything against/see anything wrong with having professional engineers and machinists as team mentors, this is just the setup i am used to and like.