I see absolutely no value in an
entirely engineer built robot. Is that really so insulting? I mean, if the students just watch the engineer do brilliant things, they might as well read a book about great innovators. I really do not mean to be insulting, I have immense respect for every F.I.R.S.T. mentor I've ever met, but for the purposes of arguement I'm talking about a hypothetical extreme: an entirely engineer/mentor built robot, something I consider to be indicative of a terrible state of affairs. It could probably never happen in the real world, I said it merely to illustrate the worst case scenario. The closer you get to that worst case scenario, the worse off you are. The flip side of the coin isn't good either: purposely shunning any engineer involvement is contrary to the spirit of F.I.R.S.T. It's about balance, and if you are going to be off-kilter, I think it better to be off kilter on the lack-of-engineer involvement side of things. But why be off-kilter?
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Originally Posted by Andy
we would have no swerve drives, no shift on the fly gearboxes, no object-oriented autonomous programming, no WFA winners, no IRI, no Battlecry, no WRRF.
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Hey now! I think students could have conceived of, designed and implemented shift on the fly gearboxes, OO-Programming and swerve drives! Most of those things are childs-play (literally) for engineers.