First let me address some comments from other posts I've seen here that imply that more restrictions in materials will mean less creative robots:
FIRST has been peeling away restrictions (rather than adding) for years. In 1995, you were given a KOP, a list of certain materials and quantities that you could use (i.e. 1 4'X8' sheet of 1/2" plywood, 3 8' 3/4" dia pieces of electrical conduit, etc), and a very small ($250?) budget that could be spent on additional parts from the Spare Parts Inc. catalog. I think you may have been able to use as many fasteners as you want and other really small things like that but I think nearly everything else was regulated. As far as I could tell the robots back then were just as creative as they are today. Sure, some of the designs today are fancier, but there was plenty of clever engineering being done back then with limited supplies.
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Originally Posted by Collmandoman
When you add more and more restrictions, the ideas generated by the students one by one become unusable one by one for the team. Mentors/Adults then have to step in and lend more advice(sometimes advice can be the same as building a robot for a student).
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It may have been just my team, but back when the above restrictions were in effect, we had many occasions where students would be the ones coming up with creative solutions. It seemed like some of the kids were better at being creative with what they had where the adults were more used to having freedom to use whatever materials and parts they thought necessary in their design. I remember a bunch of times where there would be a problem that needed to be solved on our robot and the adults would just dump out what was left of our KOP and other leftovers from Small Parts and say "we need to find a way to make this piece here work and all we have to use is this pile of stuff."
I may be drifting a bit too far off-topic here, but..
One of my favorite experiences in FIRST was when our team attended the very first Chief Delphi Invite in 1997. Back then it was a one-day event. We showed up at 8am, each team was given a kit of parts and told that inspections were at noon and the competition began at 1 (or something like that). The KOP was pretty basic: I remember a sheet of Styrofoam, some duct tape, maybe some coat hangers and other "household" items, and a pair of drive bases from some children's RC toys (think of the bases of plastic Tonka trucks with a wired remote control), one tank style and one standard 4 wheel with steering. We were supposed to basically pick up Frisbees off the ground and place them on a shelf.
The creativity shown with such a limited set of materials was amazing. We found also that the limited time and materials also really leveled the field between the kids and adults. Working with that stuff was so different than what our engineers were used to at work that I don't think they were really any better off than us. It was so much fun having to think really fast and not having much time to plan - I keep thinking that we need to recreate that event with our own team as a fall activity. It's amazing how much you can learn about teamwork and problem solving in just 4-5 hours!