Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri
It seems as if our teams work in a very similar fashion. I like the way our team is balanced now. Students come up with a strategy, then present designs to the team, and we vote on it. This is usually where the most bickering takes place. As for actual robot contruction, adult help really depends on the particular sub group of the team. For instance, our 4 speed transmissions were an iteration of team 33's shifter, and totally redesigned by 2 students. An adult threw in an idea to save some space, but all the actual design and contruction work was done by these 2 students. But, the arm team had 2 dedicated parents who were there almost every night helping machine parts and come up with design technicalities. As for other systems.. the wiring, programming, pneumatics, and end effector were all 100% student done, with no adult help.
One of my best memories from this build season was being able to walk in one day after school, and see about 10 kids all working together, without an advisor to tell them what to do, or how to do it. If we needed to figure out how to do or fix something, we went and researched the problem until we could find the answer. We were all able to work as a team, and get the job done. But at the same time, our team would be nowhere without the support and decication of our amazing advisors.
Before someone replies to this saying "oh, you're making teams who have engineer support look bad", remember this... My freshman year on the team we were sponsored by Johnson and Johnson. We had about 10 engineers who took the teams strategy and did 100% of the work on the robot. The build was boring and I didnt learn much. I fell in love with FIRST because of the competition. Now that sure inspired me... just not in the way it was meant to. I was inspired to stay on the team to go to more competitions and have fun, not to become an engineer. But without that initial inspiration, I would have never come back to find out that we had lost that sponsor, and now needed to do all of the work on the robot in our high school. 2004 was a rough year, but we got the job done. This year we improved by leaps and bounds. I have learned so much and now I know what I want to do with my life, engineering.
As for which is better.. for me I would like to see a 50/50 mix. While it is nice to say we built the entire robot, its brutal when something you've worked on for so long fails because of lack of time and knowledge. That is what I would like to see more of; also why I had the idea of the FPG. It would give every student the chance to create their very own work to share, but at the same time give every student a qualified engineer to fall back on when they are in a hole.
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