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Re: Mentors level of power
Being a rookie team, the build season was very interesting. The first 5 weeks were completely student driven and built. Seeing that most of our team consists of freshman, our mentors (parents, teachers, profs. from the university) needed to teach students basic skills (using tools, proper techniques, fundamentals of structural design, etc), but the students did all of the building.
Week 6 is when our mentors took a more active role in the building of the bot. By the end of week 5, most of the individual components were build, but not integrated. The students needed quite a bit of help integrating these components, so the mentors stepped in. It was a great learning experience for our kids. I'm not saying that the mentors slapped the robot together, but that we needed to meet our deadline, so they stepped in to help.
That's speaking for the mechanical teams. The spirit team, the website team, and the CAD team were completely student driven, all the way. The CAD team did not even have a mentor to teach the students! Using the tutorials, our students were able to figure it out.
As for my area of expertise (Electrical and Programming), these groups were also completely student driven. We had a couple of great mentors that showed kids on the electrical team the basics of wiring and fundamentals of electricity, but the students did all of the wiring for the bot. The programming team consisted of myself, another student (Casey, CD Handle: chatterboxx333), and a mentor (Keith, CD Handle: Oddjob). Pretty much what happened here was a huge collaboration. Each of us wrote blocks of code and synced them daily to an FTP. This was great because if Keith couldn't make it, it wasn't a big deal, because I could still see his code and work on it. Vise versa. We had every sensor working that we had attempted (camera, ultrasonics, IR range, accelerometer, gyro, mecanum drive encoders) and a beautiful mecanum program. Most of this was cut due to our mechanical team (We lost our scoring mechanism due to weight), but the point is that between the 3 of us, we were able to code very efficiently and before the deadline. When it came to crunch time (<27 to ship), it wasn't a huge panic to figure out code. It took all 27 hours to tweak, but it was done and ready.
If you need more information, PM me, and I'll post more.
Jacob
Last edited by whytheheckme : 24-04-2007 at 09:17.
Reason: Added CD Handles
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