[archiver]

Posted by Daniel.

Coach on team BORG (Berkeley Operational Robotics Group) from Berkeley High School sponsored by (working on the sponsor, too).

Posted on 1/14/2000 1:32 PM MST


In Reply to: Bad, bad, bad!!! posted by Daniel on 1/12/2000 12:12 AM MST:



Q&A w/Eric:

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Question:
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Rule M20 in update #1

I am a strong advocate of students doing a bulk of the work for this competition, and having engineers taking more of an advising role. This makes six weeks seem a lot shorter. Students are far less experienced, so it takes them an average of 1.5 times as long to get anything done. Doing the calculation: 6 weeks / 1.5 unproductively = 4 weeks.

Perhaps the less student oriented teams can use those extra 2 weeks to build spare parts but I know my team has NEVER had time during the actual production period to make this happen. I’d hate to see teams unable to compete because they have no replacement parts for things that have broken.

Maybe FIRST needs a tighter policy on how similar replacement parts must be, but I think this rule is excessively overprotective. What do you think?


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Answer:
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FIRST does not advocate one way or the other who should build the robots. This is an area where everyone has a different idea and we leave it up to each team to decide for themselves who does what. What we care about is that the students come away from the project with a sense that science and technology are exciting and that engineering is a viable and rewarding profession that they may wish to explore. If you choose to have the students do most of the robot building, that is ok, but keep in mind that everyone has the same amount of time.

Regarding the building of spare parts, we have for the last few years stated that teams were allowed to build spare parts after the robot shipped in order to make sure that they could repair the robot if it broke down during competition. At the same time, the rules prevented further engineering changes to the robot once it started competing at an event. We have now reversed both of these policies in order to close loopholes, more accurately reflect what really happens at events, and get to the core intent behind the rules.

The philosophy behind rule M20 is as follows: Once your robot has shipped, all work on it should cease. The reason there is a ship date that is the same for all teams is to insure that, no matter which event you attend, everyone has the same amount of time to work on their robot. Opening the door to making spare parts after the robot was shipped was a mistake because there were too many problems associated with trying to define what constitutes an “identical” spare part. It also deviated from our philosophy about the importance of the shipping date and that part of the challenge for the teams is the 6 week deadline.

At the same time, we have now given teams much greater freedom to correct design flaws when they are in the middle of competition. Previously, this was officially disallowed, but many teams did it anyway. We have now sanctioned that behavior because it helps teams get their robots up and running at an event, which is what really matters. Forcing you to keep replacing a part with a design flaw with another one of the same design only to watch it break again really isn’t in anyone’s best interest.

-Eric