[MrForbes]

Team 1726 is a second year team. Our rookie year, there were no mechanical engineers involved, the students did all the design and most of the building (with adult help for those things that required use of machines they could not use). The team was successfull, the robot worked, students and mentors (and parents) learned a lot, and people in our city became enthusiastic about robotics.

This year I've been poking my nose into the design process, teaching the students about how a mechanical engineer (me) thinks about design. I don't want to make any decisions about the design or fabrication (aside from safety issues), but I am surely going to offer a lot of ideas (which are mostly the result of having experience), and I am doing what I can to teach the students how to figure out if a design is going to work or not....while it's still in the concept or design phase. I've had to get out the books and learn and relearn a lot, and I've been really pleased to see some of the students eagerly soaking up quick lessons on how to calcluate moments of inertia, maximum stress due to bending, moments, CG, weight of materials given the dimensions, torque multiplication, what motor ratings mean, etc. None of these things were actually engineered in last years robot.

I've seen first hand that a 100% student designed and built robot can be competitive, and I have also seen first hand that high school students simply are not engineers....yet! This is a great opportunity to show them how to be an engineer (the short lesson). We are fortunate to have a few parent engineers, as well as two non-parent engineering mentors, a very enthusiastic teacher, and a great facility to work in.