Teacher Designs

[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.