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Student / Engineer Input
(Side note: Hey Dave - nice to hear from you. What ever happened to hockey?)
For our team, the design is about 75%/25% in favor of the engineers. We try to get the students involved as much as possible but the limited math/science background eliminates them from being able to do things that require a higher level of math and science (for instance, this past year's robot required about 2 pages of math to determine if our balance system would work. In the end, most of the students could understand the math but none of the students could do it themselves). However, when we do design, we always explain it to whichever student(s) are working with the engineer doing the design so that the students understand what is going on. As far as CAD work goes, most of that is done by the students. The engineers generally do analysis and make hand sketches. Then typically a student (but sometimes and engineer if we run out of student time) does the CAD drawings and checks for interferences, etc.
The fabrication is about 50-50. It starts out at about 80%/20% in favor of the students, but when crunch time comes around, it is about 80%/20% in favor of engineers. The reason, as Dave Hurt pointed out, is that the engineers will work until about 11:00 every night during the week and until about 2 a.m. or so on the weekends. We would get in trouble if we required the students to be there for all of that time. We tell the students that if they want to show up and help, they are more than welcome (and some do), but most of the students have homework and their parents won't allow them to be out that late.
I'll also point out that not all of the students on our team work with the robot. Some work on animation and the business side of the team.
Personally, it is my view that a student working with an engineer to solve a complex problem is much more inspiring than just having the student build a robot through trial-and-error. The inspiration comes from seeing how the math and science are used to solve the big problem, and that big problems can be tackled in a systematic fashion.
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