Quote:
Originally Posted by 4throck
Regular beatings. We beat them constantly.
But in all seriousness, the best way to foster student initiative is to have a completely student built/designed robot. If the kids see the seniors designing and building the robot, they know that it is within their reach to do the same. When new kids see other students knowing everything that they have to know about building a robot, they will see that with some experience, their ideas have equal weight with all other ideas.
Naturally, this fosters fosters a lot of initiative if done correctly. If the kids know the basics, and also know that it is within their ability to do what the team has done in the past, they will take the initiative. Did any of you know what you were doing as freshmen? Hell no, and neither did I. But gradually, we all worked our way up into the leadership of the team, and had a hand in making our robot.
Of course, the problem with this method is that your robot MAY not be as good as if the mentors did everything. Naturally, the students will make stupid mistakes that could have easily been gotten around, or make mistakes due to inexperience. Hopefully though, the new leadership knows enough to do well anyway. If not, remember that students still get a lot out of a robot that is a complete and utter failure. Trust me on this one.
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That happened to us this yeay.
We didn't get any sponsers and we didn't have a lot of parents who had any idea about robotics, but with reliance from our mentors, we gave out OUR ideas and combined them with our mentors idea and eventually it was the students robot. Of course, the mentors built small items of the robot that were really important and needed and expert hand to work on them, most of the work was of the students and our robot was one of the best in our regional, we received the Xerox Creativity award and were one of the most "bold" teams this year.
My team's (those who came to the regionals and stayed late at night in the building season)initiative is seen when they talked all the time about FIRST, asked me questions(because I was the only guy who still went into Chief Delphi [gah, the embarasment

]) ,but because we didn't have alot of meetings lately and we had plenty of delays because of teacher and student strikes, special days, tests and more and we're still not sure when the next meeting is, there is less initiative now.
Actually, I think I finally understand why the other team members didn't participate too much (atleast some of them). Some of them wanted to do something from their own, but our mentors, with little time to explain and help, told some of the students, like in the strategy team, to work on something but she couldn't explain too good why because she was under pressure and then the students, confused, didn't do a lot of what was told for them to do, no student came up to them and asked them what's going on(because some were too busy) and evantually they "bumed" and it translated into hatred against our mentor.
From the school's order, students must participate 2 years in the project in order to get a grade on the project, so those students that joined our team for the project will be forced to join us next year or they will have to leave and do a diffrent project for 2 years.
The current team is very mad at those students, including a bit of me, and I'm just not sure how we're gonig to be able to adapet them back into our team. :-/
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TEAM 2230 ZECHARIA'S ANGELS
2009 Microsoft Israel FRC Regional Winners!
2009 Microsoft Israel FRC Regional Chairman's Award Winners!!!
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2008 Microsoft Israel FRC Regional semi-finalist.
2008 Microsoft Israel FRC Regional Delphi's "Driving Tommorow's Technology" Award winner.
2008 Robot Driver
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2007 GM/Technion Israel FRC Regional semi-Finalist.
2007 GM/Technion Israel FRC Regional Xerox Creativity Award winner.
2007 Robot Driver.