Who built your robot?

[John Bono]

Originally posted by evulish
Chuck has become a more-and-more engineer-built robot. Sad. The students come up with the basic ideas. Then the engineers refine them, draft them, change them. They have the drive-train built, all the placement figured out. Then the students cut parts. The majority of the season is watching the engineers work. There are days when there are no students even involved (because we aren't allowed, I guess). I think us students have a small idea of what's going on with the robot but not sure of the reasoning behind all the stuff. It's really not all that fun this year :/

That's gotta suck. Why even bother making a bot if you don't learn anything?

[R2K2D2]

on our team, 461 we have incredible student participation in the entire process during the build season. this is my first year on team 461 as a Purdue college engineering advisor and the kids are phenomenol. they are totally involved in everything. we start off the build season in small groups where everyone comes up w. ideas and contribute to the team.

after the general design is chosen, the students totally step up in the design process. this year we used Autodesk Inventor, in the kit, and modeled the entire robot on it. the kids did a lot of modeling in Inventor and designing in inventor. even though there was a lot of questions and asking and discussing of items, thats wat the entire learning process is all about! it was awesome working w. such enthusiastic kids who wanted to design parts and concepts w. ur aid, instead of u doing it and being like this is how it is done. sure kids had questions but it was more like a college advisor sits in the chair next to them and discusses and shows them and guides them. sure as college advisors we did do CAD work, but i would still say our students had an incredible amount of participation in the design process.

after the bot was designed in Inventor the kids and advisors made drawings for all the parts and fabrication began. even during this part of the process the students had HUGE involvment. they spend a lot of time working on fabrication and assembly of the bot. i think many of them found it gratifying to be fabricating the parts and concepts that they had such huge involvement in designing. even w. complex parts, like every robot has, we team up 1 college advisor w. 1 or 2 high school students and set out on the path to make the part(s) and assembly. and that, in my oppinion, is one of the greatest things to be involved in as a college student mentor. working w. them is the best part of my job as a college mentor. they make it fun, exciting, and an awesome experience. not only do i help them learn and show them new things but they show me new things and help me learn.

all in all, the students on this team are totoally awesome and they work incredibly hard. they put in their time and efforts and they benefit from it all. u get out as much as you put in and I can honestly say that each and everyone of our students as well as college advisors have put in a lot of time and effort and we all learn, grow, and work as a team.

sorry about the length.........

[yangotang]

Our adults purposely don't do anything on our team in order to make us do the hard labor. We've got a couple adults on the team who do nothing but criticize *L*... but NASA wasn't good enough to give us any engineers... Oh wait, nevermind, they're out helping bellarmine because bellarmine's paying them, practically. I think it's unfair, but what can i do?

[cbernich]

I agree with wayne, If the Students do not get to build the robot themselves wheres the fun in that? Not to mention the sense of accomplishment. When my team looks back on our building period we can say wow, look at what we have designed and created practically from nothing and look at what it can do, without that feeling I doubt the competitions would be as fun for us. It is one thing to have engineers helping out in the backround, but to have them build it themselves and then handing it to a team to play is ridiculous. Without the hands on experience what have you gained as a person from the program?

Yes, students need to build the robot, but teacher and engineer guidence is a must. The lesser expierenced students need the most guidence (most of the time) and then as you spend more and more time doing this, less guidence is needed. Your engineers are kind of like the instruction manual for building the robot. If you build without instructions the product will come out incorrectly most of the time, but with the instructions it will help guide a path to success.

[tatsak42]

We design (and when we get stuck, get the engineers' help), then when we have a design, we run it by the engineers, who usually question us on what we're doing, and usually also come up with improvements (but almost never drastic redesigns). They usually just ask questions and we realize why some of it could be sketchy and stuff. And then we fabricate it all. and then fix what we messed up.

[evulish]

Originally posted by John Bono
That's gotta suck. Why even bother making a bot if you don't learn anything?

I've been arriving late or skipping meetings. It sucks...bad.

[Not2B]

Engineer ringing in for Team Lightning - 862.

I see good things in both sides of the equation. Those team with huge student design and build responsiblities will most likely get more hands on work, get a feeling of ownership in the robot, get to try things out and learn by trial and error which is better than being told what is right. ON the OTHER hand, those student's who get to watch good engineers work get to see how much hard work, hard thinking, detail work goes into something like a robot, and they get to learn good engineering practices (assuming the engineers take the time to explain stuff, which I assume most of these engineers do.) With that said...

Team 862 uses an engineer to machine alot of the metals because the machine shop has safety concerns. But he's not a professional so it looks like it's student machined. But almost all of the robot is student designed, layed out, put together, tested, rebuild, tested, rebuilt, tested, and and the program and controls are 100% student done. Me and the other engineer spend most of the time making sure the students don't hurt themselves, buying pizza, and helping with "design issues".

I like both styles of robots, both are good. (Now my students are going to tell me I need to get an engineering team together next year so they can have a WINNING robot, instead of Ziff2.0) (JUST KIDDING GUYS!)

[Trashed20]

hehe, yeah. This year we couldn't keep our mentor team and kept too many of the students..... oh well.

(p.s. our robot now moves )

[jburstein]

Engineers? What engineers. On our team the only things done by an adult is the welding of our frame because it has to be very precise and with the amount of aluminum tube involved a screw-up would be very expensive. All the other fabrication is done by students. The design is done by students, although individual students will go and seek ideas or other help from adults (not necessarily engineers). There usually isn't an adult present during our build sessions- senior team members have access to our build area, so we don't even need anyone to let us in.

I believe that engineers should essentially be resources whome students can ask for help. The whole process of building a robot should be a student led/run project. I don't think engineers should do more than correct errors unless their help is requested.

The difference between the students on my team and someone on a team where the engineers do the building is huge. At the competition my team are all in the pit fooling around with our robot, while the students from certain Ford Teams are hard at work on the demanding task of handing out buttons.

What i'm trying to say is that the difference between the two is the difference between having something taught to you, and learning it yourself. Someone who watched an engineer build a robot would probably not be able to apply a whole lot of that learning to the next year's robot.

What really makes me mad (and what has caused me to write a friggin book for a post) is that we lose to robots built by engineers. We choose to build our own robot because that's the way to learn, and in return we get flogged by a robot that is driven by a student who hadn't touched the thing until it was completed. Seems ridiculous to me.... oh well at least I know that i could do a better job fixing their robot than they could.

[BBFIRSTCHICK]

Team 1077's bot is being built by 10 kids...... and our Engineers whenever we need their help. We have never really had a problem in which we were not allowed to work on the robot. Our Engineers encourage that we do as much of the work as we possibly can. This is the most work that the students have done in years. We are building the whole bot by ourselves. Yet at the same time all our team has been participating in FIRST for more then 3 years, so we are all relatively experienced. We only have 1 Sophomore on the team. The rest of us our Seniors and Juniors. All our Engineers participated together in FIRST during High School, so they know how it is to be in our position. You can't ask for a better group of people to work with!

[OneAngryDaisy]

Originally posted by JosephM
Sparky is designed, built, programed, and tested by students. Sure, you don't win or get the Chairmans, but you learn.

What exactly do you mean with that "Chairmans" quip?

[Parks]

Our school is really tight on legal stuff so we have a staff member 'supervising' is at all times. They are there for liability reasons and that is it. They know little about robots - we do everything ourselves. If you asked anyone but a student anything about the robot they would have no clue. Our team is completely student run and the mentors are there because they have to be say the rules.
We do get help from a retired electrical engineer and the father of one of our team members.
Even if our robot is junk, which it certainly isn't, I would rather have built it than just have a beatiful bot that I hadn't touched. I really think that FIRST should look into this closely and ensure that students are extracting all the experience they can out of the competition, and are not just learning how to watch and keep their mouths shut.

[dlavery]

Originally posted by yangotang
We've got a couple adults on the team who do nothing but criticize *L*... but NASA wasn't good enough to give us any engineers... Oh wait, nevermind, they're out helping bellarmine because bellarmine's paying them, practically. I think it's unfair, but what can i do?

To quote Abraham Lincoln: "Better to remain silent and thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."

You don't know what you are talking about. Your remarks are insulting, ignorant, inappropriate, and flat out wrong. Before you speak up again, please take the trouble to actually become educated and informed.

-dave

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Y + AX^2 + B.... ehhh, whatever

[Cory]

Originally posted by yangotang
Our adults purposely don't do anything on our team in order to make us do the hard labor. We've got a couple adults on the team who do nothing but criticize *L*... but NASA wasn't good enough to give us any engineers... Oh wait, nevermind, they're out helping bellarmine because bellarmine's paying them, practically. I think it's unfair, but what can i do?

umm yeah... that was really rude. NASA is Bellarmines sponsor. Im bot sure, but I think they have been since they were rookies. They are not paying them. We were sponsore by NASA until two years ago, when they cut mucho funding. You could have NASA as a sponsor too, dont bash people and follow the grant process. Also, im not sure, but I think NASA just gives the poofs Machine shop access, and field space. I don't think they actually give them any funds, but I may be wrong.

P.S. Dave: thats one of my favorite quotes hehehe

Cory