I have found that GP can be taught, but the best way to do so is to experience it. It is also easy to teach it incorrectly. For example, I have a friend on a VEX team who's lead coach, quite honestly, talked his students into building an inferior design because winning with the origional design would have been un-GP
The kids got sick of the phrase, because the question "but is it Graciously Professional" was brought up for every idea having to do with the team.
The best way to teach it is to tell stories, and get the students to put themselves in the place of the team recieving help. Some that I have seen, from all 3 levels of FIRST:
-At a FLL competition, there were two robots using the pneumatics system. Neither team had any spare cylinders. One team's cylinder cracked, rendering it useless. The team with the broken cylinder had one more run, which was coming up very soon. The other pneumatic team offered to remove a cylinder
from their robot for the other team to use. The cylinder was removed with efforts from members of both teams, used successfully, and then reinstalled by both teams just in time for the team with the good cylinder's run.
-My FLL team went to the world championship in 2005. A few weeks before atlanta, they went to a local tournament, and made a horrifying discovery: that our mat, which had been in use for six months, had been roughed up by our robot's motion, and had considerably more friction than the brand new competition mats. The tournament director allowed us to take home two of the new mats from the competition to practice on.
-A vex team's laptop crashed. The programs were still avalible on a flash drive. A team about to face them in the finals not only lent them their computer, but also pointed out a way to optimise their autonomous mode.
-In FRC last year, our team discovered a major design flaw during our inspection, which required major work. Two neighboring teams, and even our inspector, pitched in to help us out.
As for what gracious professionalism is, I think it can be summed up by the statement of a former member of my former FLL team:
Quote:
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"Gracious Professionalism is when your Noobish Yu-Gi-Oh cards get mixed with Alex's Deck (Alex had really good cards) and you return them all correctly."
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