Practice bot morality

[rsegrest]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

Guys,
This subject is brought up every year and the same answers are usually given. While winning is a great thing, let's not loose sight of what the competition is actually attempting. We are here to inspire students. The rest is all just fluff compared to improving someone's life, setting someone on a path, or getting someone to recognize high school education is simply not enough in today's world. We know that added experience gives students more reference on making good decisions. Why would you want to limit our ability to add to someone's life or learning?

Could not agree more! This is about inspiring students to make positive changes in their lives and in turn the world!

Part of the lesson is also in realism though. For instance when you go to college there are going to be those who work harder to get the highest grade on the test while you go to an all-night Skyrim game fest. Is it their fault that you chose not to study?

FIRST does not 'demand' that you win. They ask that you give your best and full effort to succeed, learn, and help others and that is wholly upon you.

[DR3381]

Our goal on Droid Rage 3381 is to have the students build the second robot completely untouched by mentor hands between ship date and competition. It is essentially our test to see if the students have picked up everything that they were taught over the course of the build season. Students go so far as to wrap it in police tape to make sure that no adults touch this robot for any reason.

Last year, the students completed the drive platform and we were running the robot around the shop, but we ran out of time before competition before the students could complete it fully. It was never a useful as anything but a learning tool for students, but hopefully they will work harder and have more time available to them to complete the second robot this year. Its great for us as mentors to see students teaching other students and a robot being built from scratch without us. Maybe someday they won't need us at all!!!

[pfreivald]

I read the title of this thread as "Practice bot mortality" and thought, "yeah, heh, we beat the crap out of ours, too!"

If NCS can build practice bots, any team can. "Fair" is a four-letter eff-word; it belongs neither in school nor in your brain. It's fine to think, "Holy crap, there's no way we can beat the Thunder Chickens/Simbotics/Wildstang/Poofs/[insert so many other teams here]", as long as it's followed up by, "but we're sure as heck going to try!"

With FIRST, it's not "put up or shut up" like in sports... it's "put up and shut up". Don't brag, don't complain, don't whine, for GP's sake don't talk smack -- just do the best darned job you possibly can, every single time. Don't settle, and get better every week and every year. Talk to Paul Copioli if you really want to get inspired about what and how a team can go from zero to intimidating, state-of-the-art FIRST monsters through sheer effort, drive, and smarts. Legacy teams didn't become legacy teams through luck, and they sure as heck don't *stay* legacy teams through complacency and some kind of unfair advantage.

1551 isn't a FIRST powerhouse. I'm not even sure we aspire to be a powerhouse -- we just aspire to be better than we were last year, by as much as we can possibly manage given our resources. But I can assure you that we don't waste one synapse-fire on wondering whether or not what other teams are doing is fair, right, moral, ethical, or just. FIRST isn't about beating the other teams, it's about beating yourself. If you happen to get the occasional blue banner in the process, that's pretty cool, too.

To whit, if your practice bot can't be the same as your regular bot due to money or other limitations, make it close enough -- plywood instead of aluminum, toughboxes instead of planetaries, regular mecanum instead of octocanum... ...and for God's sake don't wait until your regular robot is done to build it -- wham-bang it together as fast as you can and give the protobot to your programmers as a test bench, then replace mechanisms with whatever's closer to "real" if/when you can.

Can't manage even that this year? Then focus on one or two mechanisms. Build 'em, refine 'em, and when you get to competition use your 30 lbs to replace 'em... And do that practice bot next year.

A healthy mind has no place for envy.

[nitneylion452]

Originally Posted by avanboekel

What are your thoughts on the morality of a practice bot? Sure, you are not directly breaking the rules by working on your bot past the 6 weeks, but aren't you gaining an unfair advantage over other teams? Problems you find with your practice bot will be much quicker to find and fix once you get to competition.
Plus, you are spending more than the allotted $3500. Another advantage to teams with more sponsors/ resources.

What are your opinions?

For what I bolded, this is not necessarily true. We build a practice bot for 2011 and everything worked fine after some tweaking. We made the same tweaks on the competition bot and nothing worked properly. (Anyone at the Philly Regional last year may remember us as 3167: The team that scored nothing).

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by nitneylion452

For what I bolded, this is not necessarily true.

But more often than not, I feel that it is. It's also dependent on how alike your two robots are. Over the years, 1124 had tried it's absolute hardest to build two exactly identical robots, and we must have learned tons from our second bot. Our two robots usually very translate very well to each other, and what works on one almost always works on the other. Also, it's an added plus to have your code "just work" when you go from one robot to the other.

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Daniel_LaFleur

Is it moral? Of course it is. There is no rule that is being broken.

That's the definition of legality, not morality. (They are related concepts—but not the same thing.)

[ebarker]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

FIRST isn't about beating the other teams, it's about beating yourself.

our biggest challenge is beating our selves personally and collectively as a team.

Bingo !! -- nuff said.

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by ebarker

disagree !!!!

Unfair is when 'the referee is blind' and makes a bad call against your football team, or you get a disease through no fault of your own.

If team ( or person ) A outworks, out fundraises, out performs, team ( or person ) B - yes, that is completely fair. That is the definition of fair. It isn't undue advantage.

Compare students that show up and work very hard and participate in FIRST with those that are just on the roster or just show up to socialize. It is completely fair that the hard workers earn the scholarships and Dean's List awards. The sooner a student learns that, the better off they will be. Unfortunately most don't learn until much later in life.

Ed's post should be required reading for everyone. The word "fair" gets tossed around far too often, both in FIRST and outside of it, without being fully understood.

[JaneYoung]

I like the word, ethical, rather than moral when thinking about this. It removes some of the sense of judgment for me.

Here's just a few thoughts to throw on the pile:

1. Having the time, resources, and energy to build a practice robot is an incentive. Committing to it, and following through with that commitment, shows maturity on the part of the team. It also shows that the team understands a bigger picture - doing as much as they can with the time and resources they have to be competitive.

2. That doesn't always happen. Teams may talk and plan for years and it still doesn't happen. The problem doesn't begin with resources - the problem begins with commitment. Building a practice bot and committing to practice time with the practice bot doesn't just happen.

3. A lot of factors are involved in the practice robot:
- team priorities
- management of time, organization, and funding
- practice space and availability
- goal setting

These are just a few that are involved with the commitment to building and using a practice bot for practicing. One of the biggies that isn't talked about much is the commitment of the adults' time that is involved in order to make it a worthwhile investment in achieving the team's goals. That's no small thing. Without the adults on board to coach, keep the space available, and be willing to deliver/pick up their children from practice if needed - it's not going to happen.

It's more than the practice bot. It's what the practice bot is about and what it says about the team.

Jane

[jvriezen]

Originally Posted by DR3381

It was never a useful as anything but a learning tool for students, but ...

If it was useful as a learning tool for students, it was HUGELY successful.

[jvriezen]

What would be cool is to see a powerhouse team with extra resources (people, parts, $) helping out a less mature team by helping them build a practice bot.

[tsaksa]

Originally Posted by Karthik

Ed's post should be required reading for everyone. The word "fair" gets tossed around far too often, both in FIRST and outside of it, without being fully understood.

Absolutely. I know people who think that FIRST itself in unfair. They know FIRST students who do better in math and science than other students who spend their spare time playing video games. Even if those other students did all the assigned homework! Is that fair? What about being able to put their FIRST experience on a resume, or apply their learning to real world problems? And beyond FIRST itself is it really fair to take a special class that helps you study for an SAT when others can't afford it? Of course it is a bit unfair, but it does not, and should not, stop us from helping these students learn even if it is a bit unfair to those we can't reach.

Lets all try hard not to break the real rules. Lets embrace gracious professionalization. But at the same time lets make sure that students with ambition and talent get the most opportunity we can give them to build, practice, and learn. Goodness knows that the real world will not be worrying about what is fair to them when the time comes for them to face it.

[LinuxArchitect]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

I cannot agree with this more, if a team has a large number of students then build a practice bot is just logical. It gives more students hands on time with the robot which is always a good thing. It also allows you to use your current machine as a demo bot during competition season.

Exactly. We have 82 students in our club this year. They are working, in three separate teams, on three prototype robots right now, with a few mentors working on two others. Some combination of the prototypes will get promoted to the final design, and the students will build two bots, one to bag for FRC and one to use for other activities. One robot from the bunch will go to two different science exhibits.

We probably have an advantage over a smaller team, though that can be debated. But we're still at a disadvantage to teams with better experience/skills, more money, better school support, etc.

In recent years, we built our competition robot on Thursday on the event; sometimes on Friday. But we've slowly built up our resources, and student interest is at an all time high despite those performances. We're looking to the future with a multi-year plan to turn the program into a championship FRC team.

[Anupam Goli]

Originally Posted by tsaksa

Absolutely. I know people who think that FIRST itself in unfair. They know FIRST students who do better in math and science than other students who spend their spare time playing video games. Even if those other students did all the assigned homework! Is that fair? What about being able to put their FIRST experience on a resume, or apply their learning to real world problems? And beyond FIRST itself is it really fair to take a special class that helps you study for an SAT when others can't afford it? Of course it is a bit unfair, but it does not, and should not, stop us from helping these students learn even if it is a bit unfair to those we can't reach.

Lets all try hard not to break the real rules. Lets embrace gracious professionalization. But at the same time lets make sure that students with ambition and talent get the most opportunity we can give them to build, practice, and learn. Goodness knows that the real world will not be worrying about what is fair to them when the time comes for them to face it.

I wholeheartedly agree with everything said here. FIRST has leveled the playing field by providing 6 weeks to DESIGN and BUILD, and all of the other time is dedicated to bring in spare parts and practice. Every Team is capable of getting the resources for a 2nd robot. It depends on time, commitment, and a little bit of luck. If the team spends its time in the offseason fundraising, finding new sponsors, and working on build efficiency, they earned the resources needed for that 2nd robot.

Also, if you are determined to win the competition, you will practice. Remember, FRC is a varsity sport, FIRST is the organization to promote STEM. As with all sports, practice is the key to becoming a better player. Should I penalize my school's football team if they practice 4 days a week vs another school that only practices 3 days a week?

[LinuxArchitect]

Originally Posted by jvriezen

What would be cool is to see a .... team with extra resources (people, parts, $) helping out a less mature team by helping them build a practice bot.

I will challenge my team to do that next fall.