Why FIRST is different

[Gary Dillard]

I decided to start this thread separate from a lot of the debate going on in the “Mentors on drive team” thread to emphasize a couple of points, from my view. It's been discussed before but is still a hot topic.

If your robot is “student designed, student built”, I’m sure you learned quite a lot. No doubt trial and error is where you gain a lot of knowledge – “Good judgment comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgment”. But that is not engineering. Engineering is understanding the principles involved and developing an optimal solution before you build it, analyzing it prudently, and then building and testing to make sure your assumptions were correct. It is an iterative solution as well, but the iterations require analysis of the results (failures) to correct your “model” of the system and then reviewing the modifications to be made against the appropriate design criteria (cost, weight, time, strength, deflection, etc.) to see that you have adequate margins before you build another one.

If you, as a student, believe that you can design and build a robot as well as a group of engineers, why would that inspire you to go to engineering school? If you didn’t need any “engineering training” to do it, why would you need engineering training at all? Maybe it’s because you didn’t get a chance to see your robot being engineered. Can you calculate the tooth stresses on your gears and see how much load they can take? If you move the load path on your arm 4 inches, how much will the deflection change? If you change that beam from tubing to channel, what happens to the torsional stiffness? If you change from a roller bearing to a needle bearing, can you take the thrust load? How fast will the actuator deploy if you use this solenoid versus that one, or two of them? You could certainly learn all those things by trial and error, but in the real world you don’t get an unlimited budget, and if you’re building a new $500 million dollar plane you’d rather not crash 7 or 8 prototypes figuring things out. If your stuff never breaks, how much is it overdesigned? Do you have a safety factor of 10 when 1.5 will do? In the real world that costs weight (critical in aviation) and money, so overdesigned is not better.

As Dave Lavery said at kickoff a few years back, there are hundreds of competitions and activities and science fairs where it’s all about the students doing it themselves and learning from that experience. FIRST is the one that is different. It is about students working with engineers and learning what engineers do. If you see a pit where it’s just engineers working on the robot, they’ve missed the point as well. The successful teams understand the partnership.

[MagiChau]

Very well thought out post pointing out the importance of the partnership. Drawing further conclusions, the sponsorship aspect is also what makes FIRST different. This I believe, makes teams understand that there is no unlimited supply of money to do what you want. Effort must be made to gather funds to complete projects, and its not going to be easy. Numerous teams died because of the inability to recognize this. Students have to work with mentors to organize fund raising or presenting reasons to support the project of a FIRST Robotics team.

[davidthefat]

Isn't that what the Internet is for? Just Kidding.

[Chris is me]

I agree with a lot of this thread, but I do feel it's worth noting that just because a robot is student designed and student built does not necessarily make it non-engineered. Deciding to not do analysis on particular parts is itself an engineering tradeoff rather than the necessary absence of engineering.

That said, most if not all teams you are referring to here (100% students, "zero engineers / mentors go to hell" teams) do none of these things.

[sanddrag]

Couldn't have said it better myself Gary. Nice to see people who "get" it.

[mathking]

As a teacher, the key idea for me is partnership. The ideal should be engineers working in partnership with students. For every "100% done by the students" robot there is a "90% done by the engineers" robot. In both cases the participants (while often having a good time and learning things) are missing the greatest benefit of FIRST. The chance to learn from each other. I cringe when I read a post saying "We don't want engineers working on our robot." We love to have the engineers and students work side by side. It is not only educationally better, it is more fun. I cringe just as much when I see a group of engineers pushing all the kids away from a robot to fix it. For pretty much the same reason. Our goal each year is that by the end of the season, the kids (as a group) understand the robot well enough that they can diagnose and fix problems on their own. But we always hope they won't ever have to. (Sometimes when we go to the Championships we are very "mentor-lite").

[JaneYoung]

I think that many teams who profess to be 100% student-lead teams are really working in partnership with their mentors and don't realize it. In my opinion, the mentors need to step up and help the students (and parents) understand the value of accepting the partnership, developing it, and promoting it.

Student-lead teams often have mentors who enjoy mentoring, and mentoring can often become subtle, seamless, inconspicuous. That is when students begin to think that they are doing it all themselves, when actually, that is far from the truth.

There needs to be time taken within the team to develop the understanding of how the team runs itself and why. Partnership is a word that needs to be used, explained, and promoted within the team as well as outside the team. It isn't just the students who get locked into the student-run/student-lead concept - so do their parents who may help the team with fundraising, outreach, writing grants, and travel planning. If the parents understand the team to be student-run, when in fact, it is a partnership - then a team can really run into thick walls of miscommunication - especially when promoting the team for the multiple reasons and purposes that teams need to.

Jane

[Joe G.]

As an extension of this: make sure that your team's partnership is in the right area. I find it very, very strange when people pride themselves as student built, and equally strange when people accuse teams of "having only engineers build the robot." Because, either way, if you see the actual construction of the robot as "the point," you're missing out.

Working with your hands is a fine skill to have, and one that you can certainty learn through FIRST. But you can do better. FIRST presents a unique opportunity to learn about engineering, thought processes, design, design methods, and to experience these processes first-hand. And to learn about, and be inspired to learn about, these things, students have to get involved with them!

To me, a team that hands its students detailed CAD drawings generated by engineers, that the students had no hand in, is missing the point more than many teams in which a large part of the construction is done by engineers. Even if the students build 100% of the robot, they didn't engineer it! They didn't see the process, and what their engineers had to go through to get there. Maybe they built the whole robot, and learned a lot about how to use power tools. But they didn't learn much about engineering, or see anything that would make them go "oh cool, I want to be like that."

But if the students work along with engineers to do their job, designing and engineering the robot, they'll be inspired. It doesn't matter if the robot was built by students, teachers, mentors, engineers, CNC machines, a sheet metal shop, or highly trained squirrels. If they see their work come to life, understand the process that made it come to life, and understand why it works, then that's where the magic happens.

Remember, FIRST is the sport of the mind, not the power tool world cup.

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by Joe G.

As an extension of this: make sure that your team's partnership is in the right area. I find it very, very strange when people pride themselves as student built, and equally strange when people accuse teams of "having only engineers build the robot." Because, either way, if you see the actual construction of the robot as "the point," you're missing out.

You mean FIRST isn't shop class? It sure feels that way for about 5 weeks each winter....

[davidthefat]

The programming Mentors showed up only to 3 of the meetings... Mostly on dinner days. It is fine because we don't need all that much help. In our team, I believe only one object was built by a mentor, and that is because the shop did not have the right sized hole drilling bit (sorry, programmer here). All the cadding was done by students. All the building was done by students. Most of the mentors just gave a nudge toward the right path by asking questions that the students might have overlooked.

[buildmaster5000]

To put it briefly: if every student can explain every part of their system on the robot, then the partnership has worked. (i.e. If the mechanical subteam can totally explain the robot to the judges then its all good. Same for the electrical, programming, etc. subteams)

[Jstack14]

I do agree with some of what you are saying, but to me many teams still miss the critical studnet aspect. The team i am on prides ourself in the fact we are 100% student Built and 100% student designed. When we say this we don't mean students do all the work, but student make the final decisions, and students d othe actual construcition. I remember one meeting where me and 2 engineerings sat and ran numbers through excel to caculate the best gear ratio for our minibot to climb at the fastest rate. WE considered motor efficency, gravity, slippage of the wheel, and a whole lot of other factors. I, the student, intiated this and had mentors help check my physics. This is a great example where engineers checked my math and taught me a few things that i didn't consider, but stilll i the STUDENT did the work. I think that is the value of force. Mentor's mentoring students. For me, a 100% student built and designed robot means the students make the tough decisions and do the construction. Our team's CAD model is completley done by students. We brainstorm as a team, prototype, design, test, and build our robot. When i see a robot where it is clear the mentor drew upo the cad designs, machined the parts, and then i see mentors assembling it, i feel as if studnets on that team lost part of FIRST. Yes it isn't just about the robot, it is about the process. And for that reason, it is important students are very involved in the design process and decision making, as well as construction. That process has been crucial to my understanding of how to properly engineer something.

FIRST is different because its a safe enviorment for students to create form the ground up something great. They are missing out if they don't design and engineer fully, and they also are missing out if they let others design it for them.

[EricH]

100% student designed, while impossible to actually attain*, and 100% student built are goals to work towards. But those students better be 100% mentored.

Jstack's example is a really good one: The students initiate, and learn along the way. I've been on teams where the team (students, mentors, and parents if any happen to be around) does everything, which may be an even more ideal team.

One quick thing I think needs to be said: I've seen a few posts making comments about mentors "doing all the work" in the pits lately. If your only observation of the team is glimpses into their pit at random times during a regional, you don't know whether the students were all on lunch break, at a strategy meeting, or shoved out of the way by the mentors. I'm not going to say that that sort of team doesn't exist. But what I am going to say is, unless you've watched the mentors actively shoving students out of the way, and keeping them away from the robot, consistently, then you may want to keep those observations to yourself or a trusted friend or two. The #1 fastest way to start a flame war on CD is to, based on random glimpses of only mentors working on a powerhouse team's robot, accuse that team of being mentor-designed and mentor-built. It's happened, multiple times. And the normal responses are: "It's not illegal", "It's up to the team how the Inspiration happens", and (this one is usually from the team in question, or a team close to them) "You don't know what you're talking about."



*If you're using the cRIO and the KOP motors and similar required items, those were not designed by students. At least, not by high school students--I might be willing to believe a P.E. working on a Master's or Ph.D., which would count as a college student.

[Bob Steele]

Our robots are 100% Team Designed and 100% Team Built....

The team consists of mentors and students working together...

and that's all I have to say about that...

[kgzak]

Our team's students and mentors work hand in hand. My mom (our coach) asked the other day if our mentors needed to get their hands dirty. I said that they were getting as dirty as the rest of us. Our mentors teach us a lot and we would not have a robot without their help.

Now that being said most of our mentors and all of the mentors that do the building/designing/programing with us do not have a college education.