Quote:
Originally Posted by Sunshine
Wow,
Where did that come from? He never said that students can do a job as good or better than professionals when building a robot. You totally missed the point.
I believe that there are two simple points here. Students learn, grow and have fun learning by doing. They need to be active aprticipants.
I believe that there is an underlying concern that few are willing to address/talk about. Some mentors and students are turned off by the perception that there are teams out there where the robot is totally built by the mentors. You can attempt to justify this any way you want but student teams get turned off thinking that they will never do well because they are competing against engineers NOT other students. .
I'll have nothing to do with this passive involvement of the students. If we can not motivate and educate them to produce a functional machine, we have failed.
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I think what Madison was trying to say was that FIRST is trying to change culture by getting more students interested in engineering, making science and technology professionals the heros of our culture. Obviously, you who argue that students can build a robot, that you really respect engineers, already understand that. FIRST really wants to inspire those who would never have thought about engineering - who would never have even dreamed of it as a career - who never even thought about all those cool gadgets CommanderRatchek mentioned in his post and where they came from. I was one of those students. I had never even dreamed of engineering as a career before I joined a FIRST team. I decided against going into it because it's not where my strengths lie, but FIRST made me seriously consider engineering as a career. That is how FIRST is changing the culture, not by giving students who already know they want to be engineers an chance to play with robots. Without mentors, those students will not get any exposure to what engineering really is.
I've probably told this story before, but it's a really telling one. One of the students a year older than me on my old team (which was basically completely student run - we had mentors who we used as "tools," like you're describing, who never got involved in the design/build process) had never really thought of engineering before joining FIRST. Once she joined, she thought about it a bit, then discarded the idea, because all she knew was the process we were muddling through - she thought that was "engineering," and wasn't really into it. She went through two years on the team, but didn't have any exposure to mentors, and applied to university for Biology. At the Greater Toronto Regional in 2007, we had the chance to work closely with engineers on 1114, who designed ramps alongside us - worked with us through the design procedure, and gave us fantastic ideas on how to make it work, that we as students never thought of. They designed and built our ramps with us, and I remember after the experience, she turned to me and said "That was so cool, that's what real engineers do. I really wish I had applied to engineering at university." She is currently attempting to switch into engineering, but that is an extremely difficult thing to do. If we had had mentors who helped us design and build our robot, worked through the engineering process with us, her life would be completely different.
Rachek: This debate has gone on through plenty of threads, and all I will say is this - by having the mentors design and build the robot ALONGSIDE the students, they can understand how that "black magic" works. They can go "oooh, cool, maybe I want to learn how to do that." Without that "black magic," things don't work very well, or not nearly as well as they could. I doubt there are many, if any, teams out there that have the engineers design and built the entire robot with no input from the students and no exposure of the students to the process. I don't think anyone in this thread has advocated mentors designing and building a robot in complete secrecy from the students on the team.
One thing in your post I will take a big issue with - it DOES take a degree to be an engineer. If you do not have an engineering degree, you are not an engineer. I seem to remember a thread on this from a while back, but my limited ability to search seems to not be able to find it.
Okay, that was excessively long. Whoops.