Go to Post If it's the loss of American lives that concerns the nation, why not campaign aggressively against smoking, or improve automobile safety? At least then, the benefits will be tangible, and substantially more significant to the well being of the locals. - Tristan Lall [more]
Home
Go Back   Chief Delphi > FIRST > General Forum
CD-Media   CD-Spy  
portal register members calendar search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read FAQ rules

 
 
 
Thread Tools Rating: Thread Rating: 6 votes, 3.67 average. Display Modes
Prev Previous Post   Next Post Next
  #13   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 17-02-2004, 22:57
sfield sfield is offline
Registered User
#0060 (Bionic Bulldogs)
 
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: Kingman
Posts: 6
sfield has a little shameless behaviour in the past
Re: Robot Collaboration

First off let me say I am not an active member of Team 60 still, so I don’t know every detail, nor will I pretend that I know everything about this year’s robot or team. At first glance it seems that there are a lot of angry people in the FIRST community, but then upon a second reflection I realized these people are not angry… just ignorant, ignorance is a person’s worst enemy. Those of you who are part of the large wave of antipathy in disagreement over the innovative ideas of Teams 60 and 254 need to again realize what FIRST is… a GAME. I believe you are all loosing site on what this competition is all about. Many of you incorrectly believe that FIRST is a competition where students MUST be the sole contributors to building the robots. If you are one of these people I am sorry that you haven’t yet grasped the full meaning of FIRST and let me quote the FIRST web site as I did 2 years ago when this same topic was brought up. “The FIRST Robotics Competition is an exciting, multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way.”

Secondly, it was very clear what Glenn posted as to what the ratio of student machined parts to professionally machined parts was…I believe 9-1. Or as he stated 90% of all the parts were fabricated by the team. Now I can tell you from past years experience that a group of students are not capable of doing every task on a piece of machinery such as a robot. They should not be expected to experiment with welding or other similar tasks. That would be careless and dangerous. So I fully believe that 10% of the work was done outside of the team, as it should have been.

Again quoting the FIRST web page, “Involved engineers experience again many of the reasons they chose engineering as a profession, and the companies they work for contribute to the community while they prepare and create their future workforce.” Now, that is what FIRST has written as to what the competition is. That being said I would like to know what engineers or any business professional work alone in their respective fields? Why then are people criticizing these two remarkable teams on cooperating? Doesn’t that qualify as preparing the future work force?

Lastly these two teams did NOT have to post anything about their robots or release pictures to anyone. I bet many of you posting negative comments have not let any information out about what your robots are like or what they do. Teams 60 and 254 have become known in the past few years for graciously posting pictures and information about their robots, and many around FIRST look forward to seeing the production pics of these robots. The simple gesture of posting these pictures on the internet shows that these two teams are ALL about cooperation and inspiring the FIRST community. I encourage all of you to not degrade these teams for their willingness to share their ideas. I know that this will not impact many of you who believe this will “reck” FIRST. I’m not sure how some of you call yourselves true FIRST participants if you honestly believe that teamwork and cooperation will ruin FIRST. This all goes back to my first point, that ignorance is one’s worst enemy. People oppose change because they are ignorant to the future. I challenge all of you to learn more about these two landmark FIRST teams before you rudely call for their demise.

My hats off to 60 and 254 for again adding new innovation to the FIRST community. And on a side note despite all this criticism I would like to say thank you to perhaps two of the most under appreciated men in FIRST, Glenn and George for everything they taught me over my duration in FIRST. These two gentlemen taught me things that I will be able to use for the rest of my life, and for that I will be forever grateful. So thank you for inspiring me to continually come up with new and innovative ideas.

Stephen Field
 


Thread Tools
Display Modes Rate This Thread
Rate This Thread:

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 05:34.

The Chief Delphi Forums are sponsored by Innovation First International, Inc.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2017, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright © Chief Delphi