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Unread 13-12-2007, 13:36
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Alan Anderson Alan Anderson is offline
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Re: Preseason Design: What are the Limits?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Cory View Post
...I see no reason to force teams to give up proprietary information so they can circumvent a rule that makes no sense in the first place.
The rule makes sense in the context of a robot-building competition. It has the effect of making each team do a similar amount of design work every year, regardless of how long the team has been around. That limits the ability of a team staying dominant just because it has a private pile of well-tweaked and well-tested complete designs at its disposal, regardless of its current talents.

It does not make a lot of sense in the context of inspiring students to pursue careers in engineering. It removes the real-world option of using an already-invented wheel to solve a perpetual problem. It can't completely eliminate the benefit of having done things already, so the team might naturally try a solution that worked before. Unfortunately, causing the team to design the same thing again can turn what should be an exciting process of discovery into a session of uninspiring drudgery.

Since the rule applies only to building a competition robot, and not to anything else the team wants to do, I'm leaning toward deciding it makes sense.