[archiver]

Posted by Joe Johnson, Engineer on team #47, Chief Delphi, from Pontiac Central High School and Delphi Automotive Systems.

Posted on 3/10/99 7:34 PM MST



I have been kicking around an idea for a couple of years now that I think would improve everyone's robots and specifically give rookies a jump-start.

The management of the proposal has always been one major drawback, but with the capabilities of our new website, I think that we are in a position to deal with it.

So, here is the idea, please offer opinions and suggestions.

I propose that teams identify features of their machine that are extraordinary in some way. Teams would then take digital photos (with reasonable format limits: say, less than 10 photos, each in JPEG format under 100Kbytes in size). Each digital photo would have a text file associated with it that explains the feature and your team's thinking on why it is worthy of recognition (again reasonable formats & limitations could be determined). Each idea submitted would be given a thumbnail page with links to the photos and text (our automatic processes makes this a snap for us to handle administratively). We could also add another forum similar to the three we have now to discuss the ideas submitted. (I can see that this is going to require some coding by our CGI guy, but I think we can convince him to go along with it).

Finally, I think that we could pull together a team of about 20 or so "gray beards" of FIRST to judge the ideas and to give out a suitable number of awards and honorable mentions. (We may even get FIRST to sanction the whole thing -- giving more gravity to the awards once earned).

There are many benefits to such a proposal. Below are 4 benefits I think are worth listing:

1) It would provide teams with an incentive to share their ideas with the rest of the FIRST community.

2) It would allow teams with clever ideas in areas that are not obvious to the naked eye a chance for some kudos for their worthy accomplishments.

3) It would allow teams to learn from each other. Rookie teams and veteran teams alike could all learn the tricks of the trade from each other. Face it, with 6 weeks to get these beasts in the box, we could all use some proven solutions to the hundreds of problems we all face in common.

4) It would continue to build the FIRST community. This would help to bring about the kind of FIRST community that I think FIRST wants to develop. One where we all win by helping each other, where excellence is encouraged, recognized and celebrated! Beyond this, the sharing and especially the public comments will continue to build on the strong online community that FIRST is developing.

I believe that all these things together would help to make better FIRST robots and better FIRST teams.

So...

That's it. Any comments?

If there is enough interest, I am sure that we can make it happen. But, this is another case where we all have to pull together. This won't work if only Chief Delphi and a hand full of other teams are bold enough to share some of their best ideas. We need commitments from more than 30 teams before we would go to the trouble to make it happen.

So... Can we count you in? Talk it over with your teammates and e-mail me with your name and team number if we can count on you.

Joe J