View Single Post
  #85   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 20-04-2006, 11:28
Richard Wallace's Avatar
Richard Wallace Richard Wallace is offline
I live for the details.
FRC #3620 (Average Joes)
Team Role: Engineer
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Rookie Year: 1996
Location: Southwestern Michigan
Posts: 3,658
Richard Wallace has a reputation beyond reputeRichard Wallace has a reputation beyond reputeRichard Wallace has a reputation beyond reputeRichard Wallace has a reputation beyond reputeRichard Wallace has a reputation beyond reputeRichard Wallace has a reputation beyond reputeRichard Wallace has a reputation beyond reputeRichard Wallace has a reputation beyond reputeRichard Wallace has a reputation beyond reputeRichard Wallace has a reputation beyond reputeRichard Wallace has a reputation beyond repute
Re: [moderated] pic: The 2006 NiagaraFIRST Triplets!

Quote:
Originally Posted by mluckham
... It seems that NiagaraFIRST's core team of Mentors is exceptionally experienced, organized, and accustomed to producing production drawings to a level of quality that teams of student builders can machine independently. Early enough to build, integrate, get the bugs worked out, and the robots humming - all in the same time constraints that everyone else has to work to.

We should all be so lucky.
Second that.

I'll confess my initial reaction to seeing the photo that started this thread: the design is an inspiration, but like some others I thought making three copies of it was somehow unfair.

Several weeks later I volunteered at Waterloo and saw the Triplets in action. My thinking changed.

Many of the things about NiagaraFIRST that are inspirational have been recited here already. To me the most inspirational is the speed with which the mentors developed the design for the practice robot.

In my day jobs, I've been an engineering professor, a lead engineer, a project manager, etc., and I've seen how difficult it can be to coordinate a good, usable set of drawings (or schematics or embedded software requirements) on a tight schedule. My opinion is that you can't really teach this skill -- you can only inspire people to develop it by example. And that is exactly what NiagaraFIRST is doing.
__________________
Richard Wallace

Mentor since 2011 for FRC 3620 Average Joes (St. Joseph, Michigan)
Mentor 2002-10 for FRC 931 Perpetual Chaos (St. Louis, Missouri)
since 2003

I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
(Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97)