Thread: Does collaboration do good and evil?
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Unread 03-04-2006, 09:47
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#0494 (The Martians)
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Location: Goodrich, Michigan
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Re: Does collaboration do good and evil?
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Secondly, I think that building twins or triplets is an effective game strategy but it knocks you out of the running for technical awards (which can get you to Nationals). It also, in my mind, defeats the purpose of FIRST. FIRST is about (to me anyway) inspiring engineering and while triplets demonstrate what many businesses do, I see FIRST as a program meant to inspire new ideas and new methods of creation, not mimic those already present.
For the Martians one of the reasons twins were developed had to do with getting more hands on time for the students. As our teams has grown by double digits each year, it gets harder for the students to be involved in the build (with our building system 76 hands are too many for one robot). We have the same number of mentors as in the past and doing two different designs was more than we were willing to take on, we did not want to over extend ourselves (we had never build a second “practice” robot). We believe that any student that is interested in FIRST should have the opportunity to get involved. We do not want to limit the number of students at our high school that can participate in FIRST.

Maybe you missed my post which is three above yours. We were not “knocked out of the running for technical awards” four technical awards for Team 494 and two for Team 70 shows how hard our students worked, and how well informed they are. These students all worked on developing the designs (together as one design team), they just ended up on one team or the other.

I agree 100% with you on the purpose of FIRST. If the Martians put their students into two groups and separated them for brainstorming and design, each group would have about 19 students. Which will produce more ideas and inspiration 19 students in a group or 38?

FIRST is a mimic of the business world and this is just one more way that the students can learn more about how businesses operate.

I hope that anyone that wants to learn more about how our teams operate will look us up at the Championship for more information and the pros and cons (yes there are some disadvantages, which I believe are far out weighed by the advantages to our team and FIRST).
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