Teacher Designs

[artdutra04]

This is coming from a college student mentor / former FLL/FVC/FRC team member.

1. Communication is key! You are lucky to have talented mentors that care about and support your team! If you want a more active role in ___ process, communicate that with the mentors, teachers, etc. If you sit in the corner and wish you were more involved, you will never become more involved. While mentors may be smart, we're not always psychic.

2. As a mentor, we need to look out for the overall health of the team. Depending on the student's interests (which vary from year to year), we may vary our involvement in particular subteams each year. If one year we have lots of student interest in X subgroup and not much in Y subgroup, we'll let the students do most of the X subgroup work and we'll take a much more active role in Y subgroup to make sure all the work gets done. Your teachers could have designed your robot because no students expressed an interest in being involved with the design process.

3. Most mentors are often more than willing to teach students and get them involved, but our hours of teaching are limited. Don't wait until the build season to want to learn how to do X, Y and Z. We have limited time, and can't dedicate 110% of our efforts onto multiple problems simultaneously. Sometimes, we make case-by-case decisions that it's better for the team to do X ourselves now and teach the students X in the off-season, than to teach them now.

4. For the future, organize your team into sub-teams and select student/mentor leaders for each sub-team. Team 228 has about a dozen different sub-teams, with each group having a student leader and a dedicated mentor. We give each of our sub-teams a fair amount of autonomy to pursue their goals. At the end of every meeting, we dedicate the last 10-15 minutes to everyone stopping all work/cleanup to listen to the lead student from each sub-team talk about their progress/problems encountered/future work.

We've found this works well, as people like being given autonomy, it keeps the team updated as to the progress of sub-teams, and it helps the mentors focus their efforts on areas which are most needed.

[thefro526]

This happens more often than you may think.

Without knowing how your team works, these are my thoughts:

1) Were the students involved in a high enough capacity to where they could've designed the robot? In my six seasons I've seen at least 20 kids come for kick-off, miss brainstorming and then show up in week 2 upset that they weren't allowed to be involved in the Design of the Robot. Can't design if you're not there.

2) There are often cases where no one steps up and wants to design the robot or no one is capable of doing so. I don't intend to sound mean but, I've seen a lot of kids that come up with ideas that just aren't feasible to build or won't be successful in competition. If this is the case, then someone needs to make the hard decision to build something feasible and functional.

3) Personally, I do, and have done 85-95% of the design work for 816 and have done so since 2008. What I do is take the concept decided on in Brainstorming, make sure that it can work and then turn it into a CAD model. The amount of Student involvement in this part is often minimal, because the kids are often not available, nor has anyone shown a dedicated interest in learning CAD or doing design work... Was this the case on your team?

[JamesCH95]

I have to echo what theFro said, I seem to fill the same role on my team. What I try very hard to do is to justify, in a tangible way, all of the design decisions I do make and ensure that there is a consensus supporting the decision. Sometimes there is not a consensus, and I change the design. However, I keep all of the goals in mind that the students decided were important (mini bot deployment, scoring on the top row, etc).

When students are saying things like: "we should use shape memory alloys to shift our two-speed transmission instead of pneumatics or servos" I am reassured that my design oversight is a good thing.

Having said that, if your mentors are just handing you prints and saying "this is the design, live with it" that's not what FRC is about and you need to demand a voice in the robot's design.