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Originally Posted by C.Roberts 1089
... But I'm a junior now - my third year on the team - and I still haven't learned very much about the actual building and such. There really isn't a reason why I can't be on the drive train, or electrical, or mechanical design 'part' of the team... except that I'm just not qualified. ....
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Im wondering how many engineers you have on your team, because you seem to be focused on the building and tool/wrench stuff.
Nobody at your HS is qualified to be an engineer, unless they went to college for 4 years and then decided they wanna do HS again?
Many people have the mistaken impression that engineering is building stuff. Engineering happens between your ears. Engineering is:
1. you are presented with a problem that needs to be solved
2. you clearly define what the problem is (why the task needs to be done, and what the task is)
3. then you figure out how to best solve the problem - the most effecient and elegant way to provide a solution
the rest is all nuts and bolts stuff, trivial really compaired to 1-3 above.
For example, my daughter was on a FIRST team for 3 years, and for a technology class she participated in something they called the 'sumo car competition'. Each team had two students, they were given motors and gears and some basic parts, and they had to build a small car like vehicle.
the competiton took place on a 5' diameter round table. Two teams played against each other for 60 seconds. The team that was closest to the center at the end won. Kind of a king of the hill (table) pushing contest.
Every other team at her school, and in this part of the state immediately latched onto the 'pushing contest' aspect, and designed cars with drive trains that were geared way down, big high traction tires or tank treads, and a plow or bush-wacker on the front.
My daughter did not have all these preconceived notions, had taken advanced physics, and looked at how much energy the little motor and batteries they had to use could produce? Not much it turns out. If you are head to head with someone else, all the energy you have is what you can draw from the motor/battery
but she knew about kinetic energy and momentum. Her team designed a car that was fast, geared up, and the front was shaped like a wedge.
At the HS competition all the other matches consisted of two opponents starting at opposite sides of the table, slowly going after each other, pushing and shoving for 60 seconds, and the one with the best traction usually held the center of the table. The first match she played, she hit the switches at T=0, her car flew across the table in about 2 seconds, smacked the other car and sent it flying to the floor. All the other students had a jaw-dropping experience.
Her team won at the HS competition, and they won at the upstate competition. Every match she played lasted about 2 seconds.
The point is, engineering is all about the concept. If you grab the kit of parts right after the kickoff and start building something, you are doomed.
And being creative and thinking out of the box very often comes from girls, because all of this is new to them, and they dont have any preconceived notions about how a robot should function.