Musings on Design Inspiration

[JVN]

Originally Posted by boomergeek

Hmmmm.

A Director of Product Development for a major Robotics vendor admits he is being intentionally sarcastic and judgmental about some customers that he perceives are not following the rules the WAY he thinks they should be, not how the rules are actually written by FIRST.

He feels wronged.

I'd recommend swallowing some of that pride and looking at the big picture and get with the 21th century.

Open source is the FASTEST way to bootstrao use of technology and train legions to use technology. Does your team use any software that was provided free to you?

CD has seemingly become a place for a gripe session for all the powerhouse teams to tell everyone how unfair the world is and how we need to make FIRST more about making sure the powerhouses get every bit of accolades they feel entitled to.

If you haven't actually been in deep and thoughtful communication with any of the teams that you think is copying without the students learning about engineering, then your musing are NO better than the novice teams that think mentors do all the work on the powerhouses. Actually it's worse because with your resources, you should know better.

There is no place in FIRST for musing about negative perceptions that come from ignorance.- Not by powerhouses nor by novice teams.

Lighten up people.

If you think you know enough to feel justified being intentionally sarcastic to people that volunteer for FIRST (based on what you IMAGINE is going on for those people), it's time for you to leave your bad attitude at the door and start meditating on what the real purpose of FIRST is.

Maybe as you get older, you will recognize such things.

In the heat of the moment, I can be sarcastic myself but always on reflection, I always figure out I could have handled it a better way.

FIRST is not first about making sure powerhouses do not feel jilted.
FIRST is first about bootstrapping high schools across the whole world to encourage use STEM through the use of a fun tool: the competition.

There is no doubt in my mind that fabricating copies is typically a means of inspiration. It is typically a means of bootstrapping good engineering information. I think too many teams work too much on their own, spending huge amounts of time, without checks along the way. Some don't use physics and math, some don't have basic fabrication skills, some don't 'have anyone that knows the ins and out of FRC robots nor FRC competitions.

If you think you see a team that is missing one or more of the pieces, instead of being sarcastic and judgemental, the right response is to meekly offer help. It might take years- but I think that is what FIRST is supposed to be about. Now I might be wrong, this is only my 3rd year at FIRST but over half a century at life.

Hi boomergeek,
Mea Culpa. I'm human. I'm flawed (deeply). I make many mistakes. I have feelings that I have trouble reconciling with the way I really FEEL on the whole.

My intent with many of my writings has been to showcase the "whole" JVN, my thought processes, my feelings, my flaws in the interest of stimulating discussion.

I dislike your comments regarding the "whole" which target specific pieces of my writings (out of context). Yes, the bad parts of me are bad. My negative feelings are negative. I would have hoped people would read the entire post and put it in the context of the post as a whole and in the context of my actions before judging me. I will work better to communicate my intent in the future, or just skip the bad stuff.

I also don't appreciate your "grow up kid" attitude (my words, not yours). This isn't my first rodeo. I'm sure when I'm older I will be wiser, but that doesn't mean my thoughts aren't valid today.

Yes, I'm Director of Product Development for VEX Robotics.
Yes, many of the people on this forum are my customers. Yes, you're correct, I should never as an official of VEX Robotics speak negatively about any of my customers. However... I thought I was wearing my Robowrangler hat today. I thought I was speaking as a participant of the robotics community, as a former student, and active mentor. I guess there isn't a good way for me to leave my title at the door and still participate here.

You've called me out on it twice now for this, and I've got to say that you're the first person who has commented on it. There was a long period of time I didn't post on these forums for specifically this reason. There are many others who don't post for this reason. I always hope that this is a place where we can all wear our "team hats" and discuss the issues that matter to us. I hope that perhaps others in similar situations would don their team hats and come back here in the interest of common discourse. Perhaps that hope is naive.

Ohh... I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on this discussion. I always love seeing other viewpoints. However in my opinion your tone leaves something to be desired (perhaps you meant it in response to my "tone", but I re-read my post and can't figure out what part of it justified this response).

-John

[Dmentor]

Originally Posted by JVN

I always hope that this is a place where we can all wear our "team hats" and discuss the issues that matter to us. I hope that perhaps others in similar situations would don their team hats and come back here in the interest of common discourse. Perhaps that hope is naive.

I really hope that feedback here does not dissuade you from continuing to participate. While I don't have a substantial presence here I do enjoy reading your blogs and posts and have no trouble distinguishing between your team position and your work position. Your writing is typically very thought provoking and causes me to analyze my own methods and biases. We all need those invitations to think deeper about things. Even though I don't know you personally, I've garnered a lot of inspiration from your published thoughts and your team's designs. This particularly helps a lot this time of year when I'm feeling burnt out.

We are all seeking for simplicity on the other side of complexity. So regardless of the complexity inherent in the engineering challenge, the size of the simple and hence elegant solution set will likely be small. Prevalence of a particular design will then most likely be inversely proportional to the implementation difficulty. When the game design focus narrows to a small set of objectives then we will see convergence on simple easily implemented solutions as we iteratively improve through competition.

One way of counterbalancing this phenomena is to expand the scope of game objectives. Instead of one or two objectives achievable by a single robot have a multitude of objectives including those requiring multiple robots in order to achieve. Unfortunately this is often at odds with the desire to have a audience friendly competition. I think this balance between game objectives and observability is a difficult one.

One last thought for now... In prior games, it seemed like the game design accommodated both excellent robot design as well as strategy. As robots converge on physics limited performance, the differences between alliance should therefore be resolved via strategy. However given the scoring distribution, it seems likely that difference between alliances may be determined by luck which is very unsatisfying.