[ErikJusten]

After having particpated in FIRST the last few years, and having looked around and seen how other groups operate, I've formulated my own opinions. I have to agree with the arrangement that team 308 has, and that's about how team 677 operates (though I'd like the numbers to shift more to the high school students). It is extremely difficult for us to go over certain topics in an appropriate level of detail, as not all the students have the math and physics background needed to make the disucssion worthwhile. This was extremely difficult for us this first year, since the HS student knowledge base simply wasn't there. There we times when we would toss out the words moment or torque, and then realize that we needed to explain what those were first. It's not like our girls are stupid - far from it - they just lack the knowledge base to design and build a robot from scratch. But..... our hope that this by having them build with us, and looking over our shoulders while we design, they learn by watching, and then by doing (we had the girls design a cart for our robot this year). If you couple that with an effective fall program (I'll post my written documents on what we do eventually, but we're trying something different so I'd rather wait until I see how it works before I suggest our methods), you've got the pieces in place to change that 80%/20% ratio. Granted, this will take 2 or 3 years to build the good knowledge base among the HS students so that their junior/senior year the students can do some design, but it can still happen.

However.... I'm not saying that by the end of 4 years the robot will be built entirely by HS students - that's just not feasible. Sure, they could probably design and build something, but I'd fear that too many failures in the process would make cynics out of them and turn them off of engineering. And... time is another factor (as already pointed out). As a team of college students, and not having "real jobs" or "a wife and kids" or "needing sleep", we have the luxary of pulling the late hours during crunch time if we need to (and this year we didn't really need to - we only stayed to 2 or 3 AM 2 or 3 times - a complete first for us. In years past, with another team, we spent crazy hours - I had a 50 hour day once). However, I think you could realistically make that ratio 60/40 engineers, and still produce a quality machine that could be competitive (depending on how luck dependent the game is that particular year).