Ethics of 2 teams building 2 identical robots

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Dale

There's nothing unethical about it in my opinion. I don't however think it's a good use of resources in most cases. Having two different robots means there are twice as many opportunities for students to experience the design process...the sense of discovery that only comes from doing the work, prototyping, and making the tradeoffs.

At some point you can't have any more people doing design work without tripping over yourselves. What that number is depends on how modular you can make things and the nature of the challenge. I've never seen a FRC challenge that couldn't be designed by a half dozen people. You could maybe double that but I doubt any more than that would be manageable. The communication overhead just gets too large.

I disagree that you are halving the opportunities for students to experience the design process.

Done properly you allow twice as many ideas to be prototyped/investigated. You can focus much more effort on refining specific systems.

The challenges that come with a collaboration are a lot like those that come in the real world on an engineering project involving multiple contractors, vendors, etc. Students working through those challenges is great experience for the future.

There are certainly times it is and isn't worth it. It definitely won't be easy. But it can be very rewarding.