Five FRC seasons ago, as a rookie team coach/mentor/teacher/whatever attending my very first FIRST event (the GTR, not that it matters) I was very suspicious of the level of student involvement in some of the robots.
They just looked -- and performed -- too well to have been designed, built, or programmed by students. Or so I thought...
So I actually took the time to talk to some of the students in the pit about their robots. In almost all cases there were at least a few students on the team who could provide a sufficiently detailed technical description of how everything worked that I was forced to reconsider my opinion.
It turns out that some of these students started building Lego League in elementary school and joined their school's FRC team in grade 8 or 9. By the time they were in grade 11 or 12 they had been through four or five seasons of robot R&D. They probably knew more about FRC robot design than a lot of us rookie mentors did!
Now as a veteran team I have grade 10 students who started building FLL robots for me two years ago, who are building and programming VEX robots and are in their second season of FRC. Their designs are already starting to outshine what my original grade 12 students did. What will they be building two years from now? I can't wait to see, but to a rookie team who has never been to a FIRST competition it will probably (hopefully) look and work so good that they assume it was designed, built and programmed by professionals.
Does that mean that there won't be adult guidance? Absolutely not. In fact adult guidance (combined with natural talent and personal dedication) is why these students will be performing at such a high level.
So if you see a robot that looks "too good" to be true, take the time to talk to some of the senior students on the team. In
most cases -- based on my experience -- what you will find is a team with a strong recruitment/retention program for students combined with a strong team of mentors who teach the students how to design good robots. They will probably do a lot of work in the off-season, and will probably kick your butt on the playing field as a result. I know that if I looked at the robot we built last year (mecanum drive with individual PID loops on each wheel, three ultrasonic rangefinders, CMU cam, etc.) when I was in my first year, I would have throught "yeah... right students made that".
I would consider it a compliment if people were to watch our matches and be left wondering if the robot was built by students or professionals. It would mean that I had done an outstanding job as a teacher to have a team perform at that high level.
Congratulations to teams that have worked with their students to get to the point where they seem to be "too good to be true". It takes a lot of work by the students... and a lot of teacher, mentor and coach involvement.
And if a team's robot is built purely by adults... well, then it is just all that much more sweet for the students on the opposing alliance when they win.
Jason